Nibbles

One mechanism in three or four stages, each one reachable only through the one before. Lives on logicalart.us.

Everything here, in one chronology, is on the studio index. The smaller pieces are bits, and the whole machines are bytes.

1946-1947 Nibble
Trigger
Every sweep starts at the same point, so repetitions land on each other instead of smearing.
/nibbles/trigger/
1950 Nibble
Hamming
Put the checks at the powers of two and the failures spell the address.
/nibbles/hamming/
1952 Nibble
Huffman
The two rarest symbols marry, and the tree that falls out is provably the best.
/nibbles/huffman/
1953 Nibble
Core Memory
Half a current does nothing, and reading a bit is what erases it.
/nibbles/core-memory/
1954 Nibble
The Interrupt
How a machine stops doing what it was told, and finds its way back.
/nibbles/interrupt/
1950s-1970s Nibble
Score Reel
An electromechanical table cannot add, it can only count at the speed of a motor.
/nibbles/score-reel/
1961 Nibble
CRC
Divide the message by a polynomial and the remainder is what you send.
/nibbles/crc/
1968 Nibble
Fifteen Planes
A generator that passes every test you thought to run, and lands on fifteen planes.
/nibbles/fifteen-planes/
1973-1976 Nibble
Backoff
Two machines talk at once on one wire, and both wait a random time.
/nibbles/backoff/
1974 Nibble
Checkout
The label tells the scanner which way up it went across the glass.
/nibbles/checkout/
1977-2018 Nibble
Fringes
Colour and resolution are the same currency, and the rate runs both ways.
/nibbles/fringes/
1977-1981 Nibble
Zero Address
Assembly for a processor nobody built, so one file runs everywhere.
/nibbles/zero-address/
1979 Nibble
Z-Characters
Five bits is not enough for English, so Zork learned to shift.
/nibbles/z-characters/
1982 Nibble
Interleave
Scratch the disc and watch a burst come apart into single symbols.
/nibbles/interleave/
1985 Nibble
Floating Point
The addition is exact and the answer is still wrong.
/nibbles/floating-point/
1992 Nibble
UTF-8
You can start reading in the middle, and that cost a bit in every byte.
/nibbles/utf-8/
1993 Nibble
Masking
A louder tone beside a quiet one, and the quiet one need not be stored.
/nibbles/masking/
1998 Nibble
PageRank
Importance defined by importance, and the circle closes if you iterate.
/nibbles/pagerank/
2007 Nibble
Count Distinct
Wrong on purpose, by an amount it knows before it starts.
/nibbles/count-distinct/