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Another interesting thought experiment would what if we went down to 6 bit bytes instead? Then the common values probably would be 24 and especially 48 bits (4
by zokier 1y ago
Another interesting thought experiment would what if we went down to 6 bit bytes instead? Then the common values probably would be 24 and especially 48 bits (4 and 8 bytes), but 36 bit values might have appeared also in some places. In many ways 6 bit bytes would have had similar effect than 9 bit bytes; 18 and 36 bits would have been 3 and 6 bytes instead of 2 and 4 bytes. Notably with 6 bit bytes text encoding would have needed to be multibyte from the get-go, which might have been significant benefit (12 bit ASCII?)
- wmf 1y agoSome early mainframes used 6-bit characters which is why they didn't have lowercase.
- pavpanchekha 1y agoAuthor here. I agree that this would have a similar effect; we'd probably still end up with 36-bit or 48-bit IP addresses (though 30-bit would have been possible and bad). We'd probably end up with a transition from 24-bit to 48-bit addresses. 18-bit Unicode still seems likely. Not sure how big timestamps would end up being; 30-bit is possible and bad, but 48-bit seems more likely.