The letters you see on the screen are transmitted at one byte per "character" (and non-Latin characters often require two bytes, or "wide characters").
But the "hexadecimal" (base 16) mathematics requires four bits per "digit". So for an example you may have seen, a punctuation mark in the name of an URL may be represented by a percent sign followed by its two-hexadecimal-digit code (e.g. %20"). That example is not "twenty", but "thirty-two" in hexadecimal.
Well, the OED lists "nybble" as an alternative spelling to "nibble" and some of the quotes under the computing definition are spelled that way, and some aren't. They do not make it clear that the "nybble" spelling is preferred for the computing definition. So they're not *wrong* per se, just misleading and incomplete. Which is horrible, because the OED is my *bible* and I can't stand it when they're wrong.
I heard that term when personal computers really began to get popular, in the late 1970s, but the term almost immediately faded into obscurity.
Another mathematical oddity relating to computer memory: There is confusion with the terms "kilobyte", "megabyte", "gigabyte", etc., because these terms do not refer to 1,000 bytes, 1 million bytes, 1 billion bytes, etc., but rather to 210 = 1024 bytes, 220 = 1,048,576 bytes, 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes, etc. There is a movement to change the standard metric prefixes for these terms by replacing the final two letters with bi, for binary: kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes, etc. If that doesn't leave you gibbering with confusion, you might consider a career in computer science.
Actually I totally understand that, although like most people, I tend to round off when thinking of KB, MB, and GBs. I don't see the new names taking off though.
Yes, though its original form was "nybble". The concept is important because you can take any nybble and convert it into a hexadecimal character, so you have an automatic method of data compression. This is critical when you, say, need to dump memory to determined what went wrong with your computation -- much easier to read 0A5E than it is to read 0000101001011110.
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But the "hexadecimal" (base 16) mathematics requires four bits per "digit". So for an example you may have seen, a punctuation mark in the name of an URL may be represented by a percent sign followed by its two-hexadecimal-digit code (e.g. %20"). That example is not "twenty", but "thirty-two" in hexadecimal.
Each digit is a "nybble" of data.
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(It may well be a English/American jargon thing.)
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bite -> byte
nibble -> nybble
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Not really.
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Another mathematical oddity relating to computer memory: There is confusion with the terms "kilobyte", "megabyte", "gigabyte", etc., because these terms do not refer to 1,000 bytes, 1 million bytes, 1 billion bytes, etc., but rather to 210 = 1024 bytes, 220 = 1,048,576 bytes, 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes, etc. There is a movement to change the standard metric prefixes for these terms by replacing the final two letters with bi, for binary: kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes, etc. If that doesn't leave you gibbering with confusion, you might consider a career in computer science.
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