Gregory's Server@stux Fascinating! I am wondering though, as they were measuring disk space with number of characters, wasn't there and text compression back then?
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3 comments
@EdyBolos sorry, I ought to have checked your profile before banging on about ASCII and Unicode! You know the difference. @fluidlogic haha, no worries, I just assumed you haven't. But I appreciated the effort of your answer either way. Cheers! |
@EdyBolos @stux yes, compression existed. There's no mention of it in that clip. Too complicated.
This programme was aimed at an audience of computer illiterates. The closest to a computer most people would've gotten at the time would have been via their gas, electricity or phone bill, bashed out by a chain printer: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FiEGoVzmyvs
Ian McNaught-Davis refers to 'characters' as a shorthand for 'bytes'. Back then, thanks to seven- or eight-bit #ASCII, any character in the Latin alphabet could be represented by a single byte. (Things are more complicated these days with Unicode having replaced ASCII as the way to represent written human languages.)
@EdyBolos @stux yes, compression existed. There's no mention of it in that clip. Too complicated.
This programme was aimed at an audience of computer illiterates. The closest to a computer most people would've gotten at the time would have been via their gas, electricity or phone bill, bashed out by a chain printer: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FiEGoVzmyvs