5 ms·
> "Two bits" is a term in the United States and Canada for 25 cents I don't know about Canada, but the "is" should be a "was" unless there are contexts I don't
by dustincoates 3y ago
> "Two bits" is a term in the United States and Canada for 25 cents
I don't know about Canada, but the "is" should be a "was" unless there are contexts I don't know about.
It did lead me down a little deeper the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and apparently:
> The New York Stock Exchange continued to list stock prices in $1⁄8 until June 24, 1997, at which time it started listing in $1⁄16. It did not fully implement decimal listing until January 29, 2001.
That's crazy to imagine we're less than 25 years away from the decimalization of the NYSE.
- krallja 3y agoEight bits in a (modern) byte, eight bits in a buck. I wonder if there was a conscious or subconscious correction by the team designing the IBM 360 to align with the existing “standard.”
- bschne 3y agoseems hard to pin down exactly, but in this Computerphile interview the gist seems to be "if you get to the point where you want a distinct code for upper- and lowercase characters, digits, and a few punctuation symbols, you land a little north of six bits, an odd number of bits would be annoying to implement in hardware, so let's go for eight." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuScajG_FuI&t=184s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuScajG_FuI&t=184s
- bee_rider 3y agoI wonder when a bit of memory crossed over a bit of money. Pretty early I guess.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mc32 3y agoIn other tunes it was bay rum instead of two bits.
- neom 3y ago2 bit is still used in Canada as an indicator of something less than good, otherwise unused.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI've definitely heard expressions that go something like, "Why you no-good, two-bit etc etc!", and never connected that to this until now.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoMe neither! I always tentatively assumed it's about computer bits, where two bits would be "not much", and that somehow it entered into normie vernacular. So, TIL that this is another case of society and culture in the 19th and 20th century US evolving primarily around the stock exchange :o.
- bregma 3y agoTIL Yosemite Sam was the rootinest, tootinest computer geek this side of the Pecos.
- madcaptenor 3y agoAnd of course bytes are divided into eight bits - but that's just a coincidence, because bits came first and byte sizes weren't standardized until the 1970s.
- samatman 3y agoI suspect that "bit" for binary digit and "bit" as in "two bits" is a deliberate convergence more than pure coincidence. Tukey coined the term right after the war, which is a cultural high water mark for the term two bits. It doesn't hurt that "a bit" also means the least of something one might reasonably consider, this is where the bit as a sliver of the Spanish Dollar comes from in the first place, eight pieces being about as small as it was feasible to divide the coin into. Hence two bits for the quarter.
- al_borland 3y ago
- harimau777 3y agoFun fact: The quarter being worth two bits is part of the same "split a dollar up into eights" system that resulted in Spanish dollars being called a "pieces of eight". A Spanish dollar was worth eight Spanish reals. So a quarter of a dollar would be worth two Spanish reals; hence two bits. Presumably the terminology stuck around even after the switch to US dollars.