“We always start with zero, except when we start with one.”
~~ David Tait ~~

It may sound funny but we do start with Zero… We just start counting with one!

Recently we have seen schools (and Sesame Street) teaching “Zero is a number!”

When working on computers, like I have for more than four decades, you hear words like Bit, Byte (bite), Nybble (nibble) and Crumb! Or I should say bit, crumb, nybble and byte.

“Computer Programing Makes You Fat with Bytes, Nybbles and Crumbs!”
~~ David Tait ~~

By The Numbers

Byte = Eight Bits, and “octet”, used to store one Latin character like A or a.

Nybble (also nibble) = Half a Byte or Four Bits.  Can store one hexadecimal (base 16) number 0 through F (15). Nibbles are often used to store one decimal digit 0 through 9.

Crumb = Half a nibble, a forth byte or two bits. Enough to uniquely identify one base pair of a genetic code.

Bit = The smallest information, it can only be Zero or One! Used to express diametric opposites like yes and no, male and female, light and dark, or good and evil.

Delimiters

Humans and Computers use delimiters in there numbers.

For example, humans write the number one-billion-two-million-three-thousand-fifteen as:

1,002,003,015

Some countries use periods instead of commas like:

1.002.003.015

Leading Zeros

Take out the leading zeros and it looks like an IP Address.

1.2.3.15

That could also be written with commas as delimiters:

1,2,3,15

Except IP Addresses are in Binary Coded Decimal!

And if the commas (delimiters) were billions, millions, thousands and ones, you can easily see that

1,2,3,15

is

1,002,003,015

or

1 Billion, 2 Million, 3 Thousand, 15

Which brings us back to where we started with

one-billion-two-million-three-thousand-fifteen