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[-] juliebean@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago

i thought the top bit was originally 0 or 1 depending on the evilness/odiousness of the rest of the number, as a parity check.

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The standard itself is 7-bit, since wires were deemed more valuable than endpoint logic for the teletype machines way back then. If you're running it on an 8-bit byte machine you could do it either way, although I'm not sure what the point in parity checking individual characters is. Modern software uses 0.

this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
263 points (93.4% liked)

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