• juliebean@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          edit-2
          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.