• juliebean@lemm.ee
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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.