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:
“But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)