
The Life of a Data Byte - severine
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/the-life-of-a-data-byte/
======
flohofwoe
> UTF-8 is the standard for representing characters as eight bits, allowing
> every code-point between 0-127 to be stored in a single byte...

Hmm... this makes it sound like UTF-8 uses one byte per codepoint and can't
encode codepoints beyond 127, when it actually is a variable-length encoding
where one codepoint is encoded into 8 to 48 bits (1 to 6 bytes, although in
practice 1 to 4 bytes are sufficient to encode all currently defined UNICODE
codepoints).

The same is true for UTF-16, it's not "16 bits per codepoint", but variable
length with either 16- or 32-bits per codepoint. Only UTF-32 is a fixed-width
encoding.

Basically: all UTF encodings are able to encode all UNICODE codepoints.

~~~
crehn
> In ASCII every character is a byte, and in Unicode, that’s often not true, a
> character can be 1, 2, 3, or more bytes.

In a similar note, Unicode isn't really about bytes. Unicode is essentially
just a huge map of numbers to characters descriptions. UTF encodings convert
those numbers into a sequence of bytes, and vice versa.

~~~
ZenPsycho
if only unicode were actually that simple.

------
hawkjo
Cool article. Another future method is the use of DNA (e.g. [1], [2]). Not
good for speed, but with more development it could become a great solution for
large-volume, low-access archival data.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-
storage...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-storage/) [2]
[https://www.catalogdna.com](https://www.catalogdna.com)

------
als0
> Optane claims performance 1,000 faster than NAND SSDs with 1,000 times the
> performance, while being four to five times the price of flash memory.
> Optane is proof that storage class memory is not just experimental.

This was a very bold claim from Intel. That was in 2015. It’s 2020 and I
haven’t seen any benchmarks that meet this. And it’s not clear the roadmap is
going to scale to that figure. Right now it’s still not quite good enough to
be a main memory (but as a caching tier between main memory and disk).

------
jlangemeier
So sad that the mack daddy of removable storage in the late 90's isn't
covered. Jaz disks were freaking boss for all of the 5 years they existed.

------
brohee
Small nit, I'm pretty sure 1980 5¼'' floppies where 360 Kbytes and not the
later 1.2 MBytes.

~~~
icedchai
1980 floppies were single sided with a smaller number of sectors:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk)

"With version 1.0 of PC DOS (1981), only single-sided 160 KB floppies were
supported. "

------
mrspeaker
The "rope memory" used on Apollo seems like such a crazy and cool idea. The
article has one dead link, and the reference only has a snippet more
information. I'm about to go down a google-hole on it, but can anyone point me
to their favorite rope-memory resource?

~~~
severine
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656282)

