Suppose you were designing an animal and had chosen to give it two hands. Now to choose the number of fingers. You would do well to at least consider the number ten. This is not to say that 8 or 12 fingers wouldn’t work, or even ( if you were in an especially lousy mood ) 9 or 11. Still, the ten finger design has been extensively field tested, and has been very successful. In fact, even if we were to consider Nature’s Nonsensical Nonconformists, like the koala, we might say that ten is the number of choice.
Let’s extend this to human beings. We see that with ten fingers we have been able to build tools, work with fire, and build statues with clocks in their bellies; all signs of great success, not to mention intelligence. Yes, when it comes to fingers, ten is just a dandy number.
If you want to build a computer, however, it seems better to give it just two fingers. After all, it will only use its fingers to count on. Computers work with voltage levels, and the use of two levels has been very successful. On, off; one, zero; high, low — like ten fingers on a person, two fingers on a computer is a great choice.
Oh, you could give the computer more fingers, say, four voltage levels, instead of two. You would likely become discouraged by noise problems and the cost of the circuits, but it could be done. All in all, computers seem happiest with two voltage levels, being driven from one extreme to the other; however schitzophrenic this might seem to us.
Having only two fingers, computers do insist on counting in base two. People, on the other hand, ( get it? ) have ten fingers, and being somewhat stubborn, want to count in base ten. If we could ease this crisis by finding some middle ground, it would help. It turns out the number 1024 ( ten twos multiplied together )is very close to 1000 (three tens multiplied together ). The math wizards out there realize that this means there’s a nice round number base ten that’s similiar to a nice round base two number. And nice round numbers are nice and easy to work with.
If we express base two numbers in multiples of 1024, we can get a fairly good idea of how many thousands they are. Because of this, the “K” was born. To a programmer, 1K is 1024. A TS-1000 comes with 2K of memory, or 2048 bytes.
( Eventually, all good approximations break down. Figure out how many bits there are in a 64K memory chip.)
A possible point of confusion can occur because non- programmers often use the “K” to mean exactly 1000. Thus European road signs use 1 Km to mean 1000 meters ( distance ). Electronic diagrams use Kohms to mean thousands of ohms ( resistance ). Government officals use just plain K to mean thousands of dollars ( their pocket change ).
From here on, 1K will mean 1024.
We can find an interesting use for the “K” when we look at the Timex-Sinclair video display. The 32 x 24 character display can hold a total of 768 characters. As large as this may seem, it still doesn’t show how much information can really be displayed.
A high resolution display ( built in to the TS2068, and available as an add-on for the other TS machines ) display 8 x 8, or 64 dots for each character. Each dot is equivalent to one bit, so the screen contains, 64 x 768 or 49,152 bits of information. How many characters is this? All TS machines use 8 bits per character, so this number becomes 6144.
But how many of us work all day with characters? We might get a clearer picture if we converted this number to words, but different words have different lengths. What’s a good average? A good rule if thumb is used by many publications who pay by the word, and so are vitally interested in such things. The rule is that every six characters ( numbers, letters, spaces, or punctuation ) makes one word. Using this, we can say that one TS display can contain as much information as 6144/6 or 1024 words. Exactly one “K”.
Obviously, the person who said ” A picture is worth a 1000 words” was a bit low. We just shown that a picture is worth 1024 words. It’s always possible that the statement was first made by a programmer as “A picture is worth 1K words.” A non- programmer, overhearing this, could, understandably introduce a bit if confusion. In any case, this should set the record straight.
A happy April Fool’s Day to you all.