Bits and Bytes

Bits and bytes are computer terms that have come into fairly common usage.

The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer. For this reason, it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.

The bit is a basic unit of information. It can have only one of two values, and is most commonly represented as either a 0 or 1.

The term bit is a portmanteau of binary digit.

The story of the bit began in 1948, when Bell Labs in New Jersey invented the transistor. A young engineer named Claude Shannon published  “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and he included "bit" as a new fundamental "unit for measuring information.”

At that time, it must have seemed strange to consider "information" to be measurable and quantifiable.

Shannon was entering a field that didn't exist and that he would christen “information theory.”

The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. The term is a deliberate alternate spelling of bite to avoid accidental confusion or mutation to bit.

Early computers used a variety of four-bit and six-bit binary coded decimal representations for printable graphic patterns. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the eight-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. This was an expansion of their six-bit code used in earlier card punches. The System/360 became prominent and led to ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size.

Kansas City Royals

One might suspect that the team name  of the Kansas City Royals comes from the older teams in Montreal that were named after nearby Mount Royal.

The Kansas City Royals baseball team was founded in 1969 and based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The name "Royals" is said to originate from the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899.

There is a kind of royal connection in other teams for the city: the NFL football Chiefs, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, the formerly named Kansas City Wizards of MLS, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League.

The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member team of the American League (AL) Central division. The Royals have participated in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014.

They entered the American League as an expansion franchise in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots. The city had lost the Athletics (Kansas City's previous major league team that played from 1955 to 1967) when they moved to Oakland, California in 1968.

http://kansascity.royals.mlb.com

Naming Cities and Towns

If you look up the origin of "city," you find that it comes from the early 13th century. In medieval usage, it was a cathedral town, but originally it referred to "any settlement," regardless of size.

The distinction of town and city seems to occur in the 14th century. In English, a city ranked above a town which ranked above a smaller borough.

The word city goes back to Latin civitatem originally meaning "citizenship, the condition or rights of a citizen. But the Latin word for "city" was urbs, which is where we get the adjective "urban."

There are too many names of cities and towns to name and explain, but here are some common naming conventions used in English, particularly in America.

The obvious conventio is to name a new town after an older one. In the U.S., we have Rome, NY; Moscow, IN; Berlin and Vienna, VA. This was sometimes a homage to where the early settlers had come from, but also a way to add distinction to a new place.

Settlers to new places who wanted to harken back to their old world often added "New" in front of their beloved city. New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, etc.

Adding a suffix such as town, ton, burgh, city, ville, land, or polis on the end of a noun (name or otherwise) gives us Smithville, Beaverton, Irvington, Indianapolis, Roseland etc.

Other suffixes that are not only used for place names are also used. Ford, fort, field, plains, view, burgh, side, grove, wood, and way give us Frankfort, Springfield, Pompton Plains, Plainview, Cedar Grove, Maplewood etc.

We also name places often for a founder or famous person: (Lord) Fairfax, (John Foster) Dulles, San Francisco (Saint Francis) etc.

There are also conventions in other languages. For example, the suffix -au, -aue (related to rivers or water), is used in German for settlements at rivers and creeks, such as Passau.

The suffix -burg (meaning borough) is seen in Hamburg, Luxembourg, Regensburg, Salzburg (also with the Ancient Roman reference to salt).

The suffix -berg ("mountain") is attached to Heidelberg, Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Königsberg ("king's mountain", now Kaliningrad).

The -furt means a "ford", such as with Erfurt and Frankfurt.

You must be careful in your naming though. Syracuse, New York was named for the classical city in Sicily that was founded as a Corinthian colony in the 8th century B.C.E.. But it is likely that it comes from a pre-Hellenic word, perhaps the Phoenician serah  meaning “to feel ill,” in reference to its location near a swamp.

The city of Bayonne, New Jersey comes from bayonet, a type of dagger (usually fitted to a firearm) from the French baionnette. Bayonne, a city in Gascony, is supposedly where they first were made.

Internet Versus World Wide Web

Twenty-five years ago (23 August 1991), the World Wide Web first went public when Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, granted the general public access to the web for the first time.  Despite confusions about this, it was not the start of the Internet.

What Tim did allowed less technical computer users to get on the Internet in a simple way. Some people call August 23 Internaut Day ('internaut' being a portmanteau of 'internet' and 'astronaut' – an early reference to technically able internet users).

Many people think the internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing – but they are different systems.

The Internet is a network of computers that are connected.

The World Wide Web refers to the web pages found on this network of computers. Your web browser uses the Internet in order to access the web.

Some chronology:

• 12 March 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a "distributed hypertext system" that would allow scientists at CERN, the renowned particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, to share data from experiments across networks.  He was using a NeXT computer, which was one of Steve Jobs' early products.
• October 1990, Berners-Lee began working on the world's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb – but it was later renamed Nexus so not to cause confusion between the WorldWideWeb (the software) and the World Wide Web (the information space).
• August 1991, the first website went online: http://info.cern.ch (check it out - they have preserved some cool things there)
• April 1993, World Wide Web technology was made available to all for free. "CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary and permission is given to anyone to use, duplicate, modify and distribute it," a statement read.

Tim Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which works to develop the Web. It is abbreviated WWW or W3C.

Washington DC baseball teams

Current Washington Nationals home jersey

The first professional teams appeared in Washington D.C. (District of Columbia) in 1870. There was a team called the "Olympics" and another called the "Nationals". Other teams were known as the "Nationals" and other names that played off the city being the "Capital City," such as the "Statesmen" and "Senators." Those names have bounced back and forth in and out of D.C. over the years.

By the late 1800s, "Senators" was commonly used in the media as the name for the National League team and that name carried over to the new American League entry in 1901.

When new owners took over in 1905, they solicited fans and writers for a new nickname and they decided to bounce back to using "Nationals" which was what the shirts said in 1905 and 1906.

But their name was somewhat ambiguous and since writers frequently referred to individual major league teams as being  "Americans" or "Nationals" (in reference to their league affiliation), you can find the Washington Nationals of the American League a confusing name and print references to the team as "Senators," "Nationals" (or even the "Nats") interchangeably.

According to Wikipedia, the 1933 programs for the games played in New York City advertised "Giants vs. Senators", while programs for the games played in Washington included a photo of Washington manager Joe Cronin with the caption "Nationals' Manager."

"Nationals" or "Nats" was still used on baseball cards issued by Topps as late as 1956, that name was falling out of fashion. (The popular 1955 Broadway musical Damn Yankees referred to the club as the "Senators.")

The Senators faced the heavily-favored New York Giants in the 1924 World Series and came away with the only World Series triumph for the franchise during their 60-year tenure in Washington.

t-shirt with the old Washington Senators logo via amazon.com

After the 1956 season, owner Calvin Griffith decided to officially change the name to Senators, but it wasn't until 1959 that the word "Senators" finally appeared on their shirts.

Frank Howard, Washington Senators 1970 Topps card via amazon.com 

The Washington Senators was also the name of an NFL American football team that played from 1921 to 1922.

In the confusing world of team expansions and moves from city to city, in 1961, the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota and became the Minnesota Twins.

After the 1971 season, the new Senators moved to Arlington, Texas, and debuted as the Texas Rangers the following spring.

The current Washington Nationals team (now in the National League) was a transplanted team from Montreal in 2005, where they had been known as the Expos. The old Nationals name and "classic" headline abbreviation "Nats" was also revived. Actually, there was no possibility of using the old "Washington Senators" trademark as that is still owned by the Texas Rangers organization.