Early History
The creation of computers lead to the creation of files containing data in various formats. For some, it was convenient to be able to access the data as a series of raw digits. Pairs of hexadecimal digits are the current standard but this is arbitrary as not all machines use words easily split into bytes. Octal was also common.
Read more about this topic: Hex Editor
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)