Blad Cap wrote: > I want to go back to "bit". As far as I had been learnt it comes > from English word bit what means smallest piece/amount of > information which can not by divided or splitted any more. > > The origin of nibble is quite obscure. I think this is a pure modern > programmer's jargon rarely being met in literature. Blad: On the contrary, "nibble" has the LEAST obscure origin of the three terms; it's just a back-formation from "byte". Here's a copy of the message I sent two weeks ago on the subject... Maybe you missed it? ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------ "Bit" is, indeed, a contraction of "binary digit". The earliest recorded usage was 1948 or '49, by John Tukey. The first usage of "byte" was in the mid-50's; it's generally agreed that Werner Buchholz coined the term while designing IBM's "Stretch" supercomputer. It's an alteration of the noun "bite", meaning "the amount of food taken at a bite"... The "y" was a deliberate safety feature to prevent the word from accidentally being misspelled "bit". "Nibble" is, obviously, a back-formation of "byte"; it's half a byte (4 bits, or one hexadecimal digit). Although it's often spelled "nybble" -- especially by non-programmers -- that spelling implies that it's pronounced "nigh-ble"; every programmer _I_ know spells it "nibble". ------- End of Forwarded Message ------ -Andy === Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com === Fast Forward Engineering - Vista, California === http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499