Bill,

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:54:41 -0700, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

> 
> On Aug 29, 2006, at 9:38 AM, Tamas Rudnai wrote:
> 
> > for example if you have English text with 28 letters you can
> > store it in 5 bits.
> 
> And of course there is a standard 5-bit code that handles most
> numerics and punctuation as well ("Baudot"), as well as semi-standard
> mechanisms for 6 "symbol" characters in 32bits ("Radix50"); stuff
> from the days when mainframes had a whole megabyte of core and
> space mattered.

Errr - when I got my first job on a mainframe (1974) Baudot was already ancient (it was used on teleprinters long before computers) - and that 
mainframe had 96k of memory!  After a couple of years it was upgraded to 320k - megabytes were only a dream on commercial computers  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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