My school computing book said that bit was short for “binary digit”.
Unlikely. I understand that the 8-bit byte arose with IBM in the 60s and before that things were less standardized. ASCII after all is a 7-bit code, and the predecessor to EBCDIC was 6-bit code.
Can we start making jokes about 2-bit code?
ASCII is 7 bit to allow a parity bit on transmission of an 8 bit byte representing a character.
The term “bit” was coined by John Tukey, who suggested it to Claude Shannon, who used it in his seminal 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” As noted above, it is a contraction of “binary digit”. Tukey is perhaps best remembered as one half of the Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform algorithm. It is impossible to understate how much in modern life we owe to these guys.
Yeah, when I read the thread title, I thought something along the lines of “a character that only has four states?” but I couldn’t really work that into a joke.
Maybe something about a ranger who works out at Four Corners Monument?
I actually don’t think we’ve quite answered the question. Calling someone a two-bit character does mean that they are cheap, but not in the way we normally mean it. It means they aren’t worth much–they are insignificant. Normally, if we call someone cheap, we mean they are thrifty in a negative way.
I think the two different meanings of cheap are what was confusing the OP; otherwise the definition he found online would have been sufficient.
Indeed. Having lost most of the little worth they had in the past, two-bit characters are now a dime a dozen.