7 ms·

ASCII Double-Murder (2022)

92 points by tomohawk 4y ago

the_af 4y ago
This was a pretty fun read. I enjoyed the pastiche.
interfixus 4y ago
Superb. But can't let go without obligatory Watterson: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/02/26 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/02/26
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  The dead-on imitation of hard-boiled detective prose gets me every time. "I always leave when the talk gets philosophical," indeed!
hilbert42 4y ago
Ha, 'The 360' was my first computer gig. I remember it well. By then, Hex ruled the roost and Octal had gone AWOL but kept getting mentioned in dispatches.
mbnull 4y ago
I read it in my head with the voice of Ken Nordine of Word Jazz Colors fame.
raldi 4y ago
> She gave me that big 4C4F4C laugh of hers. It gets me every time. Anyone get this joke?
- jfk13 4y ago
  It's ASCII: 0x4C = 'L', 0x4F = 'O', 0x4C = 'L'.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Thanks; that makes a lot more sense than Asparagus Gray.
jameshart 4y ago
This is a damn cover-up. Octal’s still around - working a gig for the POSIX crew as an enforcer, controlling access to files down in the directory system. Sure, he wears a mask that disguises his bits as r, w and x, but it’s definitely him.
- af3d 4y ago
  Some enforcer. At one time or another he was hired to take out Binary. (Word has it, shifty Binary was sowing divisions between the Byte gang). Octal was even told that Binary would be hanging out at the Brawling Bits Biker Club at around 10. But wouldn't you know it, the guy shows up 6 hours late! SMH
kens 4y ago
One problem with this theory that ASCII killed off octal is that ASCII was introduced in 1963, while octal was popular into the mid-1970s. The real reason that hex beat octal is 16-bit words. It's trivial to break a 16-bit word into two bytes with hex, but it's a mess in octal. To make this concrete, suppose we have the bytes 1, 2, 3, 4 in 16-bit memory. In hex, this is 0102 0304. In octal, this is 000402 001404. Hex makes it trivial to see the bytes, extract them, byte-swap, etc. In octal, you need to sit down and think. I've worked on a 16-bit octal machine (Xerox Alto) and after about 2 minutes it's obvious why hex won.
- jameshart 4y ago
  All of which makes sense since you know eight bit bytes and sixteen bit words are going to win the day. But when twelve bit words are still in contention, it isn’t so cut and dried. And ASCII is what pushes you towards preferring eight bit bytes.
  - codeflo 4y ago
    It's easy with hindsight, but there must have been people back then who foresaw that power-of-two machine words are almost as necessity as you scale up (8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64 bits).
    - jameshart 4y ago
      But that’s building off ‘8’ as the starting unit. I can definitely imagine a counterfactual where 12bit bytes became the basic building block. Imagine if early text encoding had assumed that more than the Latin alphabet would be useful (say if standards had been being set by Japanese companies rather than American ones?) - an early maybe 10bit text standard would have weighed towards 12bit bytes being more useful. 12bit bytes also work great for encoding RGB values for video - and RGBA for image processing. The importance of having a power-of-two bits might just not be that big a deal held up against all those upsides. After all, when do you really care about how many bits it takes to store an index into a byte, or a word, anyway? The << and >> bitshift operators even on a 64bit number are only using 6 bits of their operand, so even on an 8-bit-centric architecture you’re not realizing any great synergy with the powers of two. Is it so hard to imagine instead a 12-bit era, followed by a 24-bit revolution, and maybe now we’d be talking about the end of 48-bit systems as the 96-bit processors start coming to market?
codeflo 4y ago
> she said the star performer was a guy named ASCII, who really didn’t get along at all with Octal I'm not convinced. ASCII is 7 bits only, which doesn't fit much better into 2*4 than into 3*3. It's not like the extra bit would be "wasted" anywhere, both octal and hex are only for displaying numbers, not actually used in memory.
- gweinberg 4y ago
  Good point. But why would anyone want to display a number in octal anywhere, ever?
thayne 4y ago
Octal isn't quite dead. It's still used for unix permissions, because a single digit of octal corresponds to the three bit of read, write, and execute access.

92 points by tomohawk 4y ago

This was a pretty fun read. I enjoyed the pastiche.

Superb. But can't let go without obligatory Watterson: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/02/26 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/02/26

JasonFruit 4y ago
The dead-on imitation of hard-boiled detective prose gets me every time. "I always leave when the talk gets philosophical," indeed!

hilbert42 4y ago

Ha, 'The 360' was my first computer gig. I remember it well. By then, Hex ruled the roost and Octal had gone AWOL but kept getting mentioned in dispatches.

mbnull 4y ago

I read it in my head with the voice of Ken Nordine of Word Jazz Colors fame.

raldi 4y ago

> She gave me that big 4C4F4C laugh of hers. It gets me every time. Anyone get this joke?

jfk13 4y ago
It's ASCII: 0x4C = 'L', 0x4F = 'O', 0x4C = 'L'.
- raldi 4y ago
  Thanks; that makes a lot more sense than Asparagus Gray.

jameshart 4y ago

This is a damn cover-up. Octal’s still around - working a gig for the POSIX crew as an enforcer, controlling access to files down in the directory system. Sure, he wears a mask that disguises his bits as r, w and x, but it’s definitely him.

af3d 4y ago
Some enforcer. At one time or another he was hired to take out Binary. (Word has it, shifty Binary was sowing divisions between the Byte gang). Octal was even told that Binary would be hanging out at the Brawling Bits Biker Club at around 10. But wouldn't you know it, the guy shows up 6 hours late! SMH

kens 4y ago

One problem with this theory that ASCII killed off octal is that ASCII was introduced in 1963, while octal was popular into the mid-1970s. The real reason that hex beat octal is 16-bit words. It's trivial to break a 16-bit word into two bytes with hex, but it's a mess in octal. To make this concrete, suppose we have the bytes 1, 2, 3, 4 in 16-bit memory. In hex, this is 0102 0304. In octal, this is 000402 001404. Hex makes it trivial to see the bytes, extract them, byte-swap, etc. In octal, you need to sit down and think. I've worked on a 16-bit octal machine (Xerox Alto) and after about 2 minutes it's obvious why hex won.

jameshart 4y ago
All of which makes sense since you know eight bit bytes and sixteen bit words are going to win the day. But when twelve bit words are still in contention, it isn’t so cut and dried. And ASCII is what pushes you towards preferring eight bit bytes.
- codeflo 4y ago
  It's easy with hindsight, but there must have been people back then who foresaw that power-of-two machine words are almost as necessity as you scale up (8 -> 16 -> 32 -> 64 bits).
  - jameshart 4y ago
    But that’s building off ‘8’ as the starting unit. I can definitely imagine a counterfactual where 12bit bytes became the basic building block. Imagine if early text encoding had assumed that more than the Latin alphabet would be useful (say if standards had been being set by Japanese companies rather than American ones?) - an early maybe 10bit text standard would have weighed towards 12bit bytes being more useful. 12bit bytes also work great for encoding RGB values for video - and RGBA for image processing. The importance of having a power-of-two bits might just not be that big a deal held up against all those upsides. After all, when do you really care about how many bits it takes to store an index into a byte, or a word, anyway? The << and >> bitshift operators even on a 64bit number are only using 6 bits of their operand, so even on an 8-bit-centric architecture you’re not realizing any great synergy with the powers of two. Is it so hard to imagine instead a 12-bit era, followed by a 24-bit revolution, and maybe now we’d be talking about the end of 48-bit systems as the 96-bit processors start coming to market?

codeflo 4y ago

> she said the star performer was a guy named ASCII, who really didn’t get along at all with Octal I'm not convinced. ASCII is 7 bits only, which doesn't fit much better into 2*4 than into 3*3. It's not like the extra bit would be "wasted" anywhere, both octal and hex are only for displaying numbers, not actually used in memory.

gweinberg 4y ago
Good point. But why would anyone want to display a number in octal anywhere, ever?

thayne 4y ago

Octal isn't quite dead. It's still used for unix permissions, because a single digit of octal corresponds to the three bit of read, write, and execute access.