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why 64K, not 65K? - Page 2 — Parallax Forums

why 64K, not 65K?

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  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-01-29 04:00
    Standards are never changed.

    When things like languages standards need to change they issue a new standard, perhaps as a new edition of the old one, the old one never goes away.
    For example JavaScript is specified in ECMA-262, there are five editions of that published since 1997. All perfectly valid today.

    Of course what we find is that the content of the standard in the new edition almost never removes old features, it just adds new ones.
  • evanhevanh Posts: 15,935
    edited 2014-01-29 04:05
    Okay then, most new documents still abide by the older standard then. Which, I have to admit I'm happy with because even if I see MiB written I still verbalise it as MegaByte. In fact, I wouldn't know how to pronounce the new way.

    In my previous post, replace occurrences of "changed" with "revised" and it'll read better. :)
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2014-01-29 07:43
    which brings us to "trits" and "trytes".

    What fun! I think I'll just confuse somebody now. "Don't be such a trit and watch your trytes!" :)

    Yes, I think the base 10 efforts were ill conceived. The way address lines work resonates with the powers of two. Couple that with hex, and so many things in computing become easy, it's not worth dealing with base 10 units.

    Most of us just don't. So the standard is the standard, but a whole lot of people don't care, unless they are selling disk drives...
  • mindrobotsmindrobots Posts: 6,506
    edited 2014-01-29 08:45
    A really fun book that gets into code, architecture and many more fascinating things about how and why computers are what they are is Code by Charles Petzold. It's an entertaining and enjoyable read. Kept me busy on the plane during a Cleveland to Atlanta to Cleveland business trip.

    I think anybody that attempts to program a computer should read this book!
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