Bits

One idea, with nothing in it handing off to anything else. Lives on logicalart.us.

Everything here, in one chronology, is on the studio index. The larger pieces are nibbles and bytes.

1838-1865 Bit Subject: encoding.
Morse
Letter frequency, turned into dots and dashes. Badly, in places.
/bits/morse/
1876-1901 Bit Subject: encoding.
Baudot
What happens when every letter costs exactly five bits, however common it is?
/bits/baudot/
1919 Bit Subject: hardware, also logic.
Flip-Flop
Feed a circuit its own output. What does it do now that it could not do before?
/bits/flip-flop/
1928 Bit Subject: encoding, also storage.
Punch Cards
Eighty columns of holes. Everything had to fit.
/bits/punch-cards/
1932-1939 Bit Subject: hardware, also encoding, graphics.
Interlace
Odd lines, then even. Freeze the picture to see the comb.
/bits/interlace/
1937 Bit Subject: logic.
Bitwise
Every bitwise operator is a wiring diagram. The shift is not even arithmetic.
/bits/bitwise/
1945 Bit Subject: hardware.
Stored Program
Instructions are numbers. They live in the same memory as the data.
/bits/stored-program/
1945-1949 Bit Subject: numbers, also logic.
Two's Complement
The adder does not know whether the number is negative.
/bits/twos-complement/
1947-1964 Bit Subject: encoding.
Bit, Nibble, Byte
Why a byte is eight.
/bits/bit-nibble-byte/
1947 Bit Subject: hardware, also logic.
Transistor
A relay is open or closed. This one has a middle.
/bits/transistor/
1957 Bit Subject: graphics, also encoding.
Raster
How much picture fits in one bit per square? The first ones found out.
/bits/raster/
1963-1967 Bit Subject: encoding.
ASCII
There was no lowercase until 1967. Then it was one bit away.
/bits/ascii/
1965 Bit Subject: graphics, also numbers.
Bresenham
A straight line, drawn with no division and no fractions.
/bits/bresenham/
1983 Bit Subject: hardware, also graphics.
Eight Sprites
Eight per scanline and the ninth is dropped, which is why they flickered.
/bits/eight-sprites/