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Comment by dustincoates | Hacker News Reader

> "Two bits" is a term in the United States and Canada for 25 cents

I don't know about Canada, but the "is" should be a "was" unless there are contexts I don't know about.

It did lead me down a little deeper the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and apparently:

> The New York Stock Exchange continued to list stock prices in $1⁄8 until June 24, 1997, at which time it started listing in $1⁄16. It did not fully implement decimal listing until January 29, 2001.

That's crazy to imagine we're less than 25 years away from the decimalization of the NYSE.

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Fun fact: The quarter being worth two bits is part of the same "split a dollar up into eights" system that resulted in Spanish dollars being called a "pieces of eight".

A Spanish dollar was worth eight Spanish reals. So a quarter of a dollar would be worth two Spanish reals; hence two bits. Presumably the terminology stuck around even after the switch to US dollars.

Eight bits in a (modern) byte, eight bits in a buck. I wonder if there was a conscious or subconscious correction by the team designing the IBM 360 to align with the existing “standard.”

seems hard to pin down exactly, but in this Computerphile interview the gist seems to be "if you get to the point where you want a distinct code for upper- and lowercase characters, digits, and a few punctuation symbols, you land a little north of six bits, an odd number of bits would be annoying to implement in hardware, so let's go for eight."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuScajG_FuI&t=184s

I wonder when a bit of memory crossed over a bit of money. Pretty early I guess.

2 bit is still used in Canada as an indicator of something less than good, otherwise unused.

In the US it would still be fairly common for someone to know that "two bits" can mean a quarter, but it's not used much in common conversation.

I don't know if this is just me, but I particularly associate it with a purposely colloquial or "old timey" register of speech. In my head I can envision a carny with a Foghorn Leghorn accent selling me a ticket to the Ferris wheel, "That'll be two bits, son".

I'm nearly 40 and spent most of my life in the northern midwest. Never heard "two bits" before.

I've definitely heard expressions that go something like, "Why you no-good, two-bit etc etc!", and never connected that to this until now.

Me neither! I always tentatively assumed it's about computer bits, where two bits would be "not much", and that somehow it entered into normie vernacular.

So, TIL that this is another case of society and culture in the 19th and 20th century US evolving primarily around the stock exchange :o.

TIL Yosemite Sam was the rootinest, tootinest computer geek this side of the Pecos.

I suspect that "bit" for binary digit and "bit" as in "two bits" is a deliberate convergence more than pure coincidence. Tukey coined the term right after the war, which is a cultural high water mark for the term two bits. It doesn't hurt that "a bit" also means the least of something one might reasonably consider, this is where the bit as a sliver of the Spanish Dollar comes from in the first place, eight pieces being about as small as it was feasible to divide the coin into. Hence two bits for the quarter.

And of course bytes are divided into eight bits - but that's just a coincidence, because bits came first and byte sizes weren't standardized until the 1970s.

Same in the US, but I can't imagine anyone would be able to accurately pinpoint its etymology.

Surprised to hear that, I would have guessed folks over 40 would be accustomed to "2-bit wh*re" - my dad used to scream that all the time about his personal banker "god damn that man he's a f'ing 2 bit wh..." - pretty sure my grandpa used it regularly also. Maybe my family are not the most refined of people. ;)

Back in the 90s, the anti-Microsoft movement had a slogan that went something like: "Windows: a 32-bit layer on top of a 16-bit operating system originally for an 8-bit CPU derived from a 4-bit microcontroller, by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition."

Likewise, high school football cheerleaders '2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits a dollar all for XXXXX stand up and holler"

I was familiar with this as a high schooler but it never occurred to me that 2 bits was 1/4 of a dollar. It was like a nursery rhyme where you don't really think about what the words actually mean.

I grew up on the US hearing this usage, but it was primarily in Looney Tunes.

In other tunes it was bay rum instead of two bits.

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