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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

It's so weird to me that he was already 7 when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

I was in a talk of his, where he said "I was a University professor at a time when a byte was 6 bits".

He said that in his youth his colleagues were in awe of him because he was brave enough to give presentations in English. (They were shy and stuck to the local Swiss German dialect.)

The 8-bit byte didn't become a standard until the IBM System/360 was released with it in 1964.

My dad's uncle is currently 93, being born in August 1930. When he was 6 and 3/4 years old, he saw the Hindenburg fly over his home in New Brunswick, Canada the day before it caught fire in New Jersey on May 6, 1937.

What do you mean? Why is it weird? Did you mean to imply that you're surprised that he was old or that Pearl Harbor happened around an average lifetime ago ?

Well my grandfather was born years after that event, so it is kinda surprising, especially considering his profession.

My still-alive father was born before Wirth, and my grandparents were born in the 1800s. Generations can span quite a range.

Yeah, mine too (although my father died a few years back).

That being said, I was at a colleagues wedding and his grandparents were the same age as my parents, which was pretty odd.

I have a young family. My great grandmother was alive until about my highschool graduation.

People got married and had kids (age 15 for my grandma) early back in the day, not too odd.

I meant that WW2 seems so long ago to me, especially considering all the social and technological changes that have happened since then.

It's interesting to me that a person can see so much change over his lifetime.

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