the.com/bit
The smallest decision a machine can make, multiplied a trillion times into everything you love.
means A bit is the smallest unit of digital information, a single value that can be either 0 or 1.
from A blend of "binary digit," the name coined by statistician John Tukey in the 1940s and popularized by Claude Shannon in his foundational 1948 paper on information theory. The choice was a happy accident of language: "bit" was already an ancient English word for "a small piece" (as in "a bit of bread"), descended from Old English bita, related to "bite" — so the smallest crumb of meaning got the smallest crumb of a word.
- origin
- Coined from binary digit by John Tukey in 1947
- two states
- On or off, yes or no, nothing between
- eight together
- A byte, just enough to spell one letter
- quantum cousin
- The qubit can be both states at once
- old money
- Two bits once meant a quarter dollar
bitcoin — first cryptocurrency launched by satoshi nakamoto in 2009, now worth over $40,000 per coin
bitwise and operation — fundamental computer logic gate operation used in all digital systems
bit torrent — peer-to-peer file sharing protocol created by bram cohen in 2001