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Let's talk about mebibits...

They did that since way back when because not all bits being transmitted had anything to do with data. And not all words were 8bits in length. Nibbles = 4bits and they worked just fine back in ye old days. Bytes = 8bits. 64 bits is transmitted as 8 separate 8 bit messages.

Wait till he sees *bibytes

To be fair at the start it made their paltry speeds sound that much better...

This is why I exclusively use Mebibits/second

We already had a perfectly good non-confusing name for bits per second and frankly having a Gigabaud internet connection sounds awesome. I know that baud is technically different in ways that don't really matter anymore. That pedantry should be directed at people stealing 24 MB per GB they sell you

Do not dishonor the ancient ways of 7-N-1.

I worked for ISPs for 12+ years, and buddy I am right there with you.

Paul truely is a man of the People

Gigabit, like all networking

From the time where every bit mattered. Yes…pun intended. Now explain to me why Bps is called baud.

In the ye olden days, the K, M, G meant binary powers, so a "kilobyte" was 1024 bytes. But with disk manufacturers turning it into meaning "1000" (K), or "1 million" (M) or "1 billion" (G), that's why people get confused about a "1TB" drive only showing less than that on their file system.

The reason is that serial lines (eg for comms) are literally "serial" in that they send bits, not bytes. For example, on old fashioned serial lines, there are checksum & start/stop bits that are not "data". So 10 bits were sent for each 8 bits of data. Better to complain about the "G" not the "b".

Right, so this is the ISP equivalent of claiming there are 2.37 serves in a pack of potato chips or whatever?

Yes, the rates often don't account for framing, error correction, etc

It's even less once you figure in control and routing packets.

Good to know, and now simultaneously; GOD DAMNIT (i want good internet again)

Almost.. It's one "symbol"/sec. Early modems just used frequency A for 1 and B for 0. 1 symbol = 1 bit. There's a speed limit there (phone is about 4kHz bandwidth), so they defined four frequencies for a modem to hum, those could represent 00, 01, 10, 11 and send 2 bits at once. And so on...

If you're talking serial connections, then it's actually 10 bits per byte because there is a start-bit and a stop-bit framing 8 data bits.

Whatever happened to bauds

Is this true now? Back in the day, control bits meant you did not get a whole byte for every 8 bits.

I learned in compsci that lowercase b is always bits, uppercase B Bytes.

Don't forget the difference between MB (megabyte, 10^6 bytes) and MiB (mebibyte, 2^20 bytes), and to make it even more fucked up MB can actually refer to either one of those, and then you also have the bit/byte distinction...

Can we side quest a moment and remember that horse power could have been any powerful animal, and we didn't choose the llama

The responsible party deserves a karate chop

If you think this is bad look into the difference between MegaBytes and MebiBytes. 1000 Kilobytes != 1024 Kilobytes And it compounds on each, kilo, mega, giga, tera, each is further off and further off.

This is literally why I became a literary arts major

You know, I learned this a while back but never asked the follow-up question: what is the purpose of a bit as opposed to bytes?

Don’t forget about Mebibytes vs Megabytes to distinguish between 1,000,000 bytes (megabyte) and 1,048,576 bytes (mebibyte)

that is why enlightened folks call them octets

Check bit, anyone?

At least Mbps isnt 1,000,000 bps, that'd really fuck me up.

[laughs in group coded recording]

This really explains my actual download speed and pisses me off that I'm paying so much for so little‼️

“as high as”

This annoy me so fucking much

Information symbols per second. *NOT* bits per second as some seem to think. A 56kbps modem runs at 8000 baud. 2400bps modems are 600 baud. It’s a measure of the encoding system.

It's an old term for a woman of loose virtue

Deep booWEEEEEP BzzzZZZZ meeeeeep ZEEEEEEEE AUHP > Carrier Connected

What's funny is that we still use baud at work for some instrumentation.

A baud is, very technically, not the same as a bit per second. But long ago I decided to treat them that way in my head, at least until such time as I get a job as a modem engineer, at which point I will need to look up and thoroughly understand the definitions.

Oooh I can hear that handshake!

You can only achieve 100 mega-burps per second with beer

It’s not even that, is it, due to start and stop bits, transfer protocol, etc? More like 10Mb/s (which is still pretty fast to those of us who grew up with 56Kbaud modems!).

Look man, it’s not our fault that the first networks were so slow that bits was the base measurement. Think of it as remembering your ancestors.

Did you know that "byte" is not formally defined? There have been 10-bit and 7-bit bytes.

It’s from a bit of history when lines were unreliable and there was often an extra bit (or two!) sent along with each byte as error detection/correction. Data line up on pretty byte boundaries at layer 2, but not always at layer 1.

Sounds like something a Brit came up with.

This is how I feel about the decimal system, but it's too late now

Unfortunately, because data are encoded for transmission - error control and framing are present and some media require stuffing - it isn’t a straightforward mapping from bits to bytes in communications systems. If bits/sec is constant, bytes/sec often does vary. That’s why bps is better for these.

To be fair, it's easier to convert between that and shaves-and-haircuts-per-second.

Kibibytes, god, I forgot about that. I didn't run into that until a few years back when I was messing with google cloud.

If only our ancestors didn’t have 4 rays in their fins.

Check out ‘tonne’, ‘long ton’, and ‘short ton’ for additional conventional definition wackiness. This is why we can’t have nice things.

And then ESA just flat-out uses base-10 megabits all around, which is nice, except when you don't know that and are using base-2 megabits for file sizes (CaSSIS on TGO).

There’s always an xkcd.

There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.

That person was serial about it.

Should been Chonks per second

Urrrrrggggg..... It wasn't until I became an adult and a proper technical professional that I realized how I spent my childhood being lied to by video game cartridges selling themselves as 'xxx Megabits!'. Never forgive, never forget.

A pox on both houses. What the hell was the matter with "baud"? And if you tell me we should have stuck with "punch cards per minute", I'm sorry. Times have moved on.

Blaming both my haters and commodore business machines

Wait until you find out network interface statistics counters are in bytes (well, octets) and we convert it back to bits for graphing/reporting.

Marketing losers, I guarantee an engineer in the room was like "uh that's dumb" and some marketing guy was like "nah its 8x bigger so sounds great"

Tbh I don’t know the difference

Serial connection. Data ain’t sent as bytes.

what if it was butts per second

me having all those extra bits tho

If I'm designing a network system (and I have, wired and wireless) I'm figuring out how to get one bit from point A to point B as fast as I reliably can. So bps makes sense for those of us designing it. It's the marketing folks who decide how to present it to Joe public.

“Bits per second” is how I measure how good my standup routine is

hey my internet sucks enough already, please let me have the satisfaction of seeing some high numbers at least, okay?

It's simple. From the First Book of Telecommunications, first Chapter: 1: In the beginning was the baud, and the baud measured bps and the baud was bps. […] All signals were sent this way and otherwise no signal was sent. […] The data floweth through the cable; and the cable comprehendeth it not.

software devs are ngmi

Pebibyte vs Petabyte is where the real anger hits.

It’s more than that. Modems were originally serial devices, operating on bit inputs and outputs. Byte encoding of data was none of the modems business, so you could run BCD, ASCII, or EBCIDIC over the same modem in theory.

Came here to say this. If they did decide on Bytes used to be 7 bits. If you are converting octal values into binary you only need 3 bits. It is representing 2 Hexadecimal values that gave us 8 bit bytes

Tell me you're not old enough to know about computers with a byte size other than 8 without telling me...

If you're sending over a single channel (telephone audio, or a radio link, or an optical fibre), then bits/s are natural. In the simplest cases you send one bit at a time

😆

… and even when 8-bit bytes were transmitted, the addition of parity (error checking) caused 9-bits to be transmitted per byte. Thus, bytes/second would undercount the bit rate of the network.

People who measure in bits should be gently ushered into a time machine back to the 1970s where they can relive their glory days

We know you're working hard Paul. I love it here ☺️

Probably the same person that got everyone to believe mebibytes and megabytes are the same size.

Back in the day bytes were whatever size you wanted, sometimes six bits, sometimes nine. Then on an Rs232 serial line there were start bits and stop bits and parity to count too. I always divide/multiply by 10 for rough conversion

Bytes aren't always 8 bits (you probably have a 64bit computer) but a bit is always one bit.