- Nibble
about the information storage unit Image Octets in CP866 ordered by nibbles.png 192px thumb right A character table ordered by nibbles. In computing , a nibble often nybble or even nyble to simulate the spelling of byte is a four bit aggregation, ref cite book last Hall first D. V. authorlink coauthors title Microprocessors and Digital Systems publisher McGraw Hill year 1980 location pages url isbn 0 07 025571 7 id ref or half an octet computing octet . As a nibble contains 4 bits, there are sixteen 2 sup 4 sup possible values, so a nibble corresponds to a single hexadecimal digit thus, it is often referred to as a hex digit or hexit . A full byte octet is represented by two hexadecimal digits therefore, it is common to display a byte of information as two nibbles. The nibble is often called a semioctet or a quartet in a computer network networking or telecommunication context. Citation needed date July 2011 Sometimes the set of all 256 number 256 byte values is represented as a table 16 number 16 16, which gives easily readable hexadecimal codes for each value. History One early recorded use of the term nybble was in 1977 within the consumer banking technology group at Citibank that created a pre ISO 8583 standard for transactional messages, between cash machines and Citibank s data centers, in which a nybble was the basic informational unit. The term nibble originates from the fact that the term byte is a homophone of the English language English word bite . A nibble is a small bite, which in this context is construed as half a bite . The alternative spelling nybble parallels the spelling of byte , as noted in editorials in Kilobaud Microcomputing Kilobaud and Byte magazine Byte in the early eighties. Citation needed date April 2007 The nibble is used to describe the amount of memory used to store a digit of a number stored in binary coded decimal packed decimal format within an IBM mainframe. This technique is used to make computations faster and debugging easier ... more details
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