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82-533: Communication is facilitated by the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) which allows connection to Usenet servers and data transfer over the internet. Similar to another early (yet still used) protocol SMTP which is used for email messages, NNTP allows both server-server and client-server communication. This means that newsgroups can be replicated from server to server which gives the Usenet network

164-441: A "post". Some newsgroups allow posts on a wide variety of themes, regarding anything a member chooses to discuss as on-topic , while others keep more strictly to their particular subject, frowning on off-topic posts. The news admin (the administrator of a news server ) decides how long posts are kept on their server before being expired (deleted), which is called retention . Different servers will have different retention times for

246-400: A 60-bit word without having to split a byte between one word and the next. If longer bytes were needed, 60 bits would, of course, no longer be ideal. With present applications, 1, 4, and 6 bits are the really important cases.     With 64-bit words, it would often be necessary to make some compromises, such as leaving 4 bits unused in a word when dealing with 6-bit bytes at

328-467: A 64-bit word length for Stretch. It also supports NSA 's requirement for 8-bit bytes. Werner's term "Byte" first popularized in this memo.     NB. This timeline erroneously specifies the birth date of the term "byte" as July 1956 , while Buchholz actually used the term as early as June 1956 .     [...] 60 is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Hence bytes of length from 1 to 6 bits can be packed efficiently into

410-458: A birth certificate. But I am sure that "byte" is coming of age in 1977 with its 21st birthday.     Many have assumed that byte, meaning 8 bits, originated with the IBM System/360, which spread such bytes far and wide in the mid-1960s. The editor is correct in pointing out that the term goes back to the earlier Stretch computer (but incorrect in that Stretch was the first, not

492-447: A carrier group is used for crossposting to aid distribution. This is typically only useful for groups that have been removed or newer alt.* groups. Crossposts between hierarchies, outside of the Big 8 and alt.* hierarchies, are prone to failure. Newsgroups are often arranged into hierarchies , theoretically making it simpler to find related groups. The term top-level hierarchy refers to

574-472: A convenience, because 1024 is approximately 1000 . This definition was popular in early decades of personal computing , with products like the Tandon 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch DD floppy format (holding 368 640 bytes) being advertised as "360 KB", following the 1024 -byte convention. It was not universal, however. The Shugart SA-400 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk held 109,375 bytes unformatted, and

656-430: A file uploaded once will be spread to many other servers and can then be downloaded by an unlimited number of users. More useful is that users download from a local news server, rather than from a more distant machine with perhaps limited connectivity, as may be the case with peer-to-peer technology. In fact, this is another benefit of newsgroups: it is usually not expected that users share. If every user makes uploads then

738-484: A full transmission unit usually additionally includes a start bit, 1 or 2 stop bits, and possibly a parity bit , and thus its size may vary from seven to twelve bits for five to eight bits of actual data. For synchronous communication the error checking usually uses bytes at the end of a frame .     Terms used here to describe the structure imposed by the machine design, in addition to bit , are listed below.      Byte denotes

820-475: A group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i.e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term

902-409: A long while, it was impossible to send binary data as such. As workarounds, codecs such as Uuencode and later Base64 and yEnc were developed which encoded the binary data from the files to be transmitted (e.g. sound or video files) to text characters which would survive transmission over Usenet. At the receiver's end, the data needed to be decoded by the user's news client . Additionally, there

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984-444: A news server maintains agreements with other nearby news servers to synchronize regularly. In this way news servers form a redundant network. When a user posts to one news server, the post is stored locally. That server then shares posts with the servers that are connected to it for those newsgroups they both carry. Those servers do likewise, propagating the posts through the network. For newsgroups that are not widely carried, sometimes

1066-553: A news server with Transport Layer Security (TLS), TCP port 563 is often used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS . Alternatively, a plain-text connection over port 119 may be changed to use TLS via the STARTTLS command. In October 2006, the IETF released RFC   3977 , which updates NNTP and codifies many of the additions made over the years since RFC 977. At the same time, the IETF also released RFC   4642 , which specifies

1148-514: A newsgroup, and anybody can remove it, but most news administrators will ignore these requests unless a local user requests the group by name. There are a number of newsgroup hierarchies outside of the Big 8 (and alt.*) that can be found on many news servers. These include non-English language groups, groups managed by companies or organizations about their products, geographic/local hierarchies, and even non-internet network boards routed into NNTP. Examples include (alphabetically): Additionally, there

1230-406: A number of bits, treated as a unit, and usually representing a character or a part of a character.     NOTES:     1 The number of bits in a byte is fixed for a given data processing system.     2 The number of bits in a byte is usually 8.      We received the following from W Buchholz, one of the individuals who

1312-496: A practice called Usenet backup , or uBackup. While commercial providers offer easier-to-use online backup services , storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). A user must manually select, prepare and upload the data . Because anyone can download the backup files, the data is typically encrypted . After the files are uploaded, the uploader has no control over them; they are automatically distributed to all Usenet providers that subscribe to

1394-545: A unit of logarithmic power ratio named after Alexander Graham Bell , creating a conflict with the IEC specification. However, little danger of confusion exists, because the bel is a rarely used unit. It is used primarily in its decadic fraction, the decibel (dB), for signal strength and sound pressure level measurements, while a unit for one-tenth of a byte, the decibyte, and other fractions, are only used in derived units, such as transmission rates. The lowercase letter o for octet

1476-405: A unit which "contains an unspecified amount of information ... capable of holding at least 64 distinct values ... at most 100 distinct values. On a binary computer a byte must therefore be composed of six bits". He notes that "Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits...When we speak of bytes in connection with MIX we shall confine ourselves to

1558-439: Is completion rates and the other is retention rates . The business of premium news servers is generated primarily on their ability to offer superior completion and retention rates, as well as their ability to offer very fast connections to users. Completion rates are significant when users wish to download large files that are split into pieces; if any one piece is missing, it is impossible to successfully download and reassemble

1640-650: Is 1024 bytes = 1024 bytes, one mebibyte (1 MiB) is 1024 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes, and so on. In 1999, Donald Knuth suggested calling the kibibyte a "large kilobyte" ( KKB ). The IEC adopted the IUPAC proposal and published the standard in January 1999. The IEC prefixes are part of the International System of Quantities . The IEC further specified that the kilobyte should only be used to refer to 1000 bytes. Lawsuits arising from alleged consumer confusion over

1722-504: Is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit .)     A word consists of the number of data bits transmitted in parallel from or to memory in one memory cycle. Word size is thus defined as a structural property of the memory. (The term catena was coined for this purpose by the designers of the Bull GAMMA 60  [ fr ] computer.)      Block refers to

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1804-460: Is defined as eight bits. It is a signed data type, holding values from −128 to 127. .NET programming languages, such as C# , define byte as an unsigned type, and the sbyte as a signed data type, holding values from 0 to 255, and −128 to 127 , respectively. In data transmission systems, the byte is used as a contiguous sequence of bits in a serial data stream, representing the smallest distinguished unit of data. For asynchronous communication

1886-450: Is defined as the symbol for octet in IEC ;80000-13 and is commonly used in languages such as French and Romanian , and is also combined with metric prefixes for multiples, for example ko and Mo. More than one system exists to define unit multiples based on the byte. Some systems are based on powers of 10 , following the International System of Units (SI), which defines for example

1968-647: Is defined to equal 1,000 bytes—is recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yottabyte (YB), equal to 1000 bytes. The additional prefixes ronna- for 1000 and quetta- for 1000 were adopted by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in 2022. This definition is most commonly used for data-rate units in computer networks , internal bus, hard drive and flash media transfer speeds, and for

2050-608: Is equal to 1,024 (i.e., 2 ) bytes is defined by international standard IEC 80000-13 and is supported by national and international standards bodies ( BIPM , IEC , NIST ). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yobibyte (YiB), equal to 1024 bytes. The natural binary counterparts to ronna- and quetta- were given in a consultation paper of the International Committee for Weights and Measures' Consultative Committee for Units (CCU) as robi- (Ri, 1024 ) and quebi- (Qi, 1024 ), but have not yet been adopted by

2132-433: Is just as easy to use all six bits in alphanumeric work, or to handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits. All this can be done by pulling the appropriate shift diagonals. An analogous matrix arrangement is used to change from serial to parallel operation at the output of the adder. [...]     byte:     A string that consists of

2214-459: Is often called a nibble , also nybble , which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit. The term octet unambiguously specifies a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions. Historically, the term octad or octade was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin of

2296-411: Is sometimes still referred to as "NNRP". Terabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits . Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures . To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from

2378-445: Is the free.* hierarchy, which can be considered "more alt than alt.*". There are many local sub-hierarchies within this hierarchy, usually for specific countries or cultures (such as free.it.* for Italy). Network News Transfer Protocol The Network News Transfer Protocol ( NNTP ) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles ( netnews ) between news servers , and for reading/posting articles by

2460-477: Is then discussed in news.groups.proposals . Once the proposal has been formalized with a name, description, charter, the Big-8 Management Board will vote on whether to create the group. If the proposal is approved by the Big-8 Management Board , the group is created. Groups are removed in a similar manner. Creating a new group in the alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the same rules; anybody can create

2542-457: Is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (ie, different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit. )      System/360 took over many of

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2624-584: The IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers , June 1959, page 121. The notions of that paper were elaborated in Chapter 4 of Planning a Computer System (Project Stretch) , edited by W Buchholz, McGraw-Hill Book Company (1962). The rationale for coining the term was explained there on page 40 as follows: Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character

2706-624: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) as the Federal Information Processing Standard , which replaced the incompatible teleprinter codes in use by different branches of the U.S. government and universities during the 1960s. ASCII included the distinction of upper- and lowercase alphabets and a set of control characters to facilitate the transmission of written language as well as printing device functions, such as page advance and line feed, and

2788-610: The Great Renaming of 1986–1987, before which all of these newsgroups were in the net.* hierarchy. At that time there was a great controversy over what newsgroups should be allowed. Among those that the Usenet cabal (who effectively ran the Big 7 at the time) did not allow were those concerning recipes , recreational drug use , and sex . This situation resulted in the creation of an alt.* (short for "alternative") Usenet hierarchy, under which these groups would be allowed. Over time,

2870-614: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry 's (IUPAC) Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols attempted to resolve this ambiguity by proposing a set of binary prefixes for the powers of 1024, including kibi (kilobinary), mebi (megabinary), and gibi (gigabinary). In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by adopting the IUPAC's proposed prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, etc.) to unambiguously denote powers of 1024. Thus one kibibyte (1 KiB)

2952-513: The UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers, which were powerful time-sharing systems . Readers and posters logged into these computers reading the articles directly from the local disk. As local area networks and Internet participation proliferated, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers connected to local networks. The resulting protocol

3034-508: The Adder. The Adder may accept all or only some of the bits.     Assume that it is desired to operate on 4 bit decimal digits , starting at the right. The 0-diagonal is pulsed first, sending out the six bits 0 to 5, of which the Adder accepts only the first four (0-3). Bits 4 and 5 are ignored. Next, the 4 diagonal is pulsed. This sends out bits 4 to 9, of which the last two are again ignored, and so on.     It

3116-511: The IEC and ISO. An alternative system of nomenclature for the same units (referred to here as the customary convention ), in which 1 kilobyte (KB) is equal to 1,024 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) is equal to 1024 bytes and 1 gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1024 bytes is mentioned by a 1990s JEDEC standard. Only the first three multiples (up to GB) are mentioned by the JEDEC standard, which makes no mention of TB and larger. While confusing and incorrect,

3198-502: The Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word , coming from Memory in parallel, into characters , or 'bytes' as we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially. The 60 bits are dumped into magnetic cores on six different levels. Thus, if a 1 comes out of position 9, it appears in all six cores underneath. Pulsing any diagonal line will send the six bits stored along that line to

3280-473: The Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes, which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum, and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing.     Since then the term byte has generally meant 8 bits, and it has thus passed into the general vocabulary.     Are there any other terms coined especially for

3362-621: The System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different. In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony on long-distance trunk lines . These used the eight-bit μ-law encoding . This large investment promised to reduce transmission costs for eight-bit data. In Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming (first published in 1968), Donald Knuth uses byte in his hypothetical MIX computer to denote

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3444-480: The ability to maintain a level of robust data persistence as a result of built-in data redundancy. However, most users will access using only the client-server commands of NNTP and in almost all cases will use a GUI for browsing as opposed to command line based client-server communication specified in the NNTP protocol. Newsgroups generally come in either of two types, binary or text. There is no technical difference between

3526-571: The binary and decimal definitions of multiples of the byte have generally ended in favor of the manufacturers, with courts holding that the legal definition of gigabyte or GB is 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 (10 ) bytes (the decimal definition), rather than the binary definition (2 , i.e., 1 073 741 824 ). Specifically, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that "the U.S. Congress has deemed

3608-417: The bounds of the network uses the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (Internet standard RFC 3977 of 2006, updating RFC 977 of 1986). Newsgroup servers are hosted by various organizations and institutions. Most Internet service providers host their own news servers , or rent access to one, for their subscribers. There are also a number of companies who sell access to premium news servers. Every host of

3690-449: The capacities of most storage media , particularly hard drives , flash -based storage, and DVDs . Operating systems that use this definition include macOS , iOS , Ubuntu , and Debian . It is also consistent with the other uses of the SI prefixes in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance . A system of units based on powers of 2 in which 1 kibibyte (KiB)

3772-522: The common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol ( RFC   791 ) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet . Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness . The size of the byte has historically been hardware -dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code

3854-448: The computer field which have found their way into general dictionaries of English language?     1956 Summer: Gerrit Blaauw , Fred Brooks , Werner Buchholz , John Cocke and Jim Pomerene join the Stretch team. Lloyd Hunter provides transistor leadership.     1956 July [ sic ]: In a report Werner Buchholz lists the advantages of

3936-627: The customary convention is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system and random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, and in marketing and billing by telecommunication companies, such as Vodafone , AT&T , Orange and Telstra . For storage capacity, the customary convention was used by macOS and iOS through Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iOS 10, after which they switched to units based on powers of 10. Various computer vendors have coined terms for data of various sizes, sometimes with different sizes for

4018-454: The decimal definition of gigabyte to be the 'preferred' one for the purposes of 'U.S. trade and commerce' [...] The California Legislature has likewise adopted the decimal system for all 'transactions in this state. ' " Earlier lawsuits had ended in settlement with no court ruling on the question, such as a lawsuit against drive manufacturer Western Digital . Western Digital settled the challenge and added explicit disclaimers to products that

4100-432: The desired file. To work around the problem, a redundancy scheme known as Parchive (PAR) is commonly used. Many major news servers have a retention time of more than seven years. A number of websites exist to keep an index of files posted to binary newsgroups. Partly because of such long retention times, as well as growing uploading and downloading speeds, Usenet is also used by individuals to store backup data in

4182-647: The end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego , and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley , wrote RFC   977 , the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan O. Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer . Usenet was originally designed based on

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4264-469: The former sense of the word, harking back to the days when bytes were not yet standardized." The development of eight-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. Microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 , the direct predecessor of the 8086 , could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity

4346-409: The hierarchy defined by the prefix before the first dot. The most commonly known hierarchies are the Usenet hierarchies . So for instance newsgroup rec.arts.sf.starwars.games would be in the rec.* top-level Usenet hierarchy, where the asterisk (*) is defined as a wildcard character . There were seven original major hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups, known as the "Big 7": These were all created in

4428-554: The input and output. However, the LINK Computer can be equipped to edit out these gaps and to permit handling of bytes which are split between words. [...]     [...] The maximum input-output byte size for serial operation will now be 8 bits, not counting any error detection and correction bits. Thus, the Exchange will operate on an 8-bit byte basis, and any input-output units with less than 8 bits per byte will leave

4510-428: The instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit . Another origin of byte for bit groups smaller than a computer's word size, and in particular groups of four bits , is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957, which

4592-418: The integral data type unsigned char must hold at least 256 different values, and is represented by at least eight bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1). Various implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte. In addition, the C and C++ standards require that there are no gaps between two bytes. This means every bit in memory is part of a byte. Java's primitive data type byte

4674-461: The last, of IBM's second-generation transistorized computers to be developed).     The first reference found in the files was contained in an internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch . A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use

4756-454: The laxness of rules on newsgroup creation in alt.* compared to the Big 7 meant that many new topics could, given time, gain enough popularity to get a Big 7 newsgroup. There was a rapid growth of alt.* as a result, and the trend continues to this day. Because of the anarchistic nature with which the groups sprang up, some jokingly referred to ALT standing for " A narchists , L unatics and T errorists " (a backronym ). In 1995, humanities.*

4838-477: The newsgroup they are uploaded to, so there will be copies of them spread all around the world. Most Newsgroups are not moderated. A moderated newsgroup has one or more individuals who must approve posts before they are published. A separate address is used to submit posts and the moderators then propagate those they approve of. The first moderated newsgroups appeared in 1984 under mod.* according to RFC 2235 , "Hobbes' Internet Timeline". Transmission within and at

4920-455: The number of words transmitted to or from an input-output unit in response to a single input-output instruction. Block size is a structural property of an input-output unit; it may have been fixed by the design or left to be varied by the program.     [...] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long.     Figure 2 shows

5002-456: The physical or logical control of data flow over the transmission media. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the eight-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), an expansion of their six-bit binary-coded decimal (BCDIC) representations used in earlier card punches. The prominence of

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5084-596: The platform. The number of newsgroups grew from more than 100 as of 1983 to more than 110,000, but only 20,000 or so of those are active. Newsgroups vary in popularity; some newsgroups receive fewer than a dozen posts per year while the most popular can get several thousand in under an hour. While newsgroups were not created with the intention of distributing files such as pictures, sound and video, they have proven to be quite effective for this. As of 2022, some remain popular as an alternative to BitTorrent to share and download files. Because newsgroups are widely distributed,

5166-452: The potential ambiguity of the term "byte". The symbol for octet, 'o', also conveniently eliminates the ambiguity in the symbol 'B' between byte and bel . The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in

5248-455: The prefix kilo as 1000 (10 ); other systems are based on powers of two . Nomenclature for these systems has led to confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 use standard SI prefixes ( kilo , mega , giga , ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes ( kibi , mebi , gibi , ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) or they might use

5330-525: The prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity when the prefixes M or G are used. While the difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is relatively small for the kilobyte (about 2% smaller than the kibibyte), the systems deviate increasingly as units grow larger (the relative deviation grows by 2.4% for each three orders of magnitude). For example, a power-of-10-based terabyte is about 9% smaller than power-of-2-based tebibyte. Definition of prefixes using powers of 10—in which 1 kilobyte (symbol kB)

5412-613: The same newsgroup; some may keep posts for as little as one or two weeks, others may hold them for many years. Back when the early community was the pioneering computer society, the common habit seen with many posts was a notice at the end that disclosed whether the author had (or was free of) a personal interest (financial, political or otherwise) in making the post. This is rarer now, and the posts must be read more skeptically, as with other media. Privacy and phishing issues have also risen in importance. Usenet newsgroups posters and operators usually do not make money from their occupations on

5494-450: The same term even within a single vendor. These terms include double word , half word , long word , quad word , slab , superword and syllable . There are also informal terms. e.g., half byte and nybble for 4 bits, octal K for 1000 8 . Contemporary computer memory has a binary architecture making a definition of memory units based on powers of 2 most practical. The use of the metric prefix kilo for binary multiples arose as

5576-399: The servers would be flooded; thus it is acceptable and often encouraged for users to just leech . There were originally a number of obstacles to the transfer of binary files over Usenet. Usenet was originally designed with the transmission of text in mind, and so the encoding of posts caused losses in binary data where the data was not part of the protocol's character set . Consequently, for

5658-580: The term byte became common. The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in

5740-519: The term is unclear, but it can be found in British, Dutch, and German sources of the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the documentation of Philips mainframe computers. The unit symbol for the byte is specified in IEC 80000-13 , IEEE 1541 and the Metric Interchange Format as the upper-case character B. In the International System of Quantities (ISQ), B is also the symbol of the bel ,

5822-403: The two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to minimize network bandwidth usage. Generally, Usenet conventions and rules are enacted with the primary intention of minimizing the overall amount of network traffic and resource usage. Typically, the newsgroup is focused on a particular topic of interest. A message sent for publication on a newsgroup is called

5904-516: The ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Internationally, the unit octet explicitly defines a sequence of eight bits, eliminating

5986-425: The usable capacity may differ from the advertised capacity. Seagate was sued on similar grounds and also settled. Many programming languages define the data type byte . The C and C++ programming languages define byte as an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment" (clause 3.6 of the C standard). The C standard requires that

6068-479: The use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) via NNTP over STARTTLS . During an abortive attempt to update the NNTP standard in the early 1990s, a specialized form of NNTP intended specifically for use by clients, NNRP, was proposed. This protocol was never completed or fully implemented, but the name persisted in InterNetNews 's (INN) nnrpd program. As a result, the subset of standard NNTP commands useful to clients

6150-549: Was NNTP, which resembled the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) but was tailored for exchanging newsgroup articles. A newsreader, also known as a news client, is a software application that reads articles on Usenet, either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP. The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. Well-known TCP port 433 ( NNSP ) may be used when doing a bulk transfer of articles from one server to another. When clients connect to

6232-560: Was a limit on the size of individual posts so that large files could not be sent as single posts. To get around this, Newsreaders were developed which were able to split long files into several posts. Intelligent newsreaders at the other end could then automatically group such split files into single files, allowing the user to easily retrieve the file. These advances have meant that Usenet is used to send and receive many terabytes of files per day. There are two main issues that pose problems for transmitting large files over newsgroups. The first

6314-404: Was advertised as "110 Kbyte", using the 1000 convention. Likewise, the 8-inch DEC RX01 floppy (1975) held 256 256 bytes formatted, and was advertised as "256k". Some devices were advertised using a mixture of the two definitions: most notably, floppy disks advertised as "1.44 MB" have an actual capacity of 1440 KiB , the equivalent of 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. In 1995,

6396-444: Was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes, and persisted, in legacy systems, into the twenty-first century. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables or slab , before

6478-438: Was created for the discussion of the humanities (e.g. literature, philosophy), and the Big 7 became the Big 8. The alt.* hierarchy has discussion of all kinds of topics, and many hierarchies for discussion specific to a particular geographical area or in a language other than English. Before a new Big 8 newsgroup can be created, an RFD (Request For Discussion) must be posted into the newsgroup news.announce.newgroups , which

6560-515: Was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time. The possibility of going to 8-bit bytes was considered in August 1956 and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly thereafter .     The first published reference to the term occurred in 1959 in a paper ' Processing Data in Bits and Pieces ' by G A Blaauw , F P Brooks Jr and W Buchholz in

6642-530: Was jointly developed by Rand , MIT, and IBM. Later on, Schwartz's language JOVIAL actually used the term, but the author recalled vaguely that it was derived from AN/FSQ-31 . Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary-coded decimal (BCD) representations and the six-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army ( FIELDATA ) and Navy . These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to seven bits of coding, called

6724-468: Was working on IBM's Project Stretch in the mid 1950s. His letter tells the story.     Not being a regular reader of your magazine, I heard about the question in the November 1976 issue regarding the origin of the term "byte" from a colleague who knew that I had perpetrated this piece of jargon [see page 77 of November 1976 BYTE, "Olde Englishe"] . I searched my files and could not locate

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