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What is 'Nibble'?

People have always asked me why I used the name 'NibbleGuru'. The obvious word that they don't understand is 'nibble', so I thought it might be a good idea to explain it :)

A nibble (or less commonly, nybble) is the computing term for a four-bit aggregation[1], or half an octet (an octet being an 8-bit byte). As a nibble contains 4 bits, there are sixteen (24) 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 networking or telecommunication context. Sometimes the set of all 256 byte values is represented as a table 16×16, which gives easily readable hexadecimal codes for each value.

The term "nibble" originates from the fact that the term "byte" is a pun on the 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 and Byte in the early eighties.[citation needed]

The nibble is used to describe the amount of memory used to store a digit of a number stored in packed decimal format
within an IBM mainframe. This technique is used to reduce space
requirements, make computations faster, and make debugging easier. An
8-bit byte is split in half and each nibble is used to store one digit.
The last nibble of the variable is reserved for the sign. Thus a
variable which can store up to nine digits would be "packed" into 5
bytes. Ease of debugging resulted from the numbers being readable in a hex dump where two hex numbers are used to represent the value of a byte, as 16×16 = 28.

Historically, there have been cases where the term "nybble" was used
for a set of bits fewer than 8, but not necessarily 4. In the Apple II microcomputer line,
much of the disk drive control was implemented in software. Writing
data to a disk was done by converting 256-byte pages into sets of 5-bit
or, later, 6-bit nibbles; loading data from the disk required the
reverse. Note that the term byte also had this ambiguity; at one time, byte
meant a set of bits but not necessarily 8. Today, the terms "byte" and
"nibble" generally refer to 8- and 4-bit collections, respectively, and
are not often used for other sizes.

Source: Wikipedia

Given this, I thought it made perfect sense to name this website NibbleGuru as it is aimed at helping people with their computer problems :) 

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Re: What is 'Nibble'?

Special thanks to my old pal Arnab Nandi who was quite instrumental in helping me decide the name.

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