Do you know what a bit is? If I say what is 8-bits you may have the image of an NES game in your head. But no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about money bits, not computer bits.

There is a famous old song that has the following curious line:

two hours of pushing broom, buys an
eight by twelve four-bit room

Four-bit room? What the heck is that? Probably many of the older people from the US know what it is. Four bits is fifty cents.

What the? How? Why? These might be questions running through your head. So just what the what is a bit?

This goes back to the usage of the Spanish dollar in the early United States. The Spanish dollar was the most common currency at the time. It could be divided into 8 reales, nicknamed bits. You may have heard the other nickname of this coin: Pieces of Eight.

Anyway, so a bit was literally 1/8th of a Spanish dollar. And when we talk about a division of that coin, we really do mean it literally.

^source

If you needed change, you might have to take a quick stop at the local blacksmith to make it for you. Wild, huh?

Anyway, when the US started her own currency using the decimal system, the name bits remained in use. The US doesn't (and didn't) have a 1/8th dollar coin, which would be 12 1/2 cents. The dime (10 cents) would be the closest and sometimes it was called a short bit. But the more common usage, at least the one that survived long after the colonial period, was using two-bits to refer to a quarter (25 cents), or any multiple of two (i.e., four-bit, six-bit, eight-bit) to refer to a multiple of 25 cents.

This slang lasted for quite a while. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s people still used it, though usually only older people. I heard it a lot when collecting money for my paper route. I don't know how much it survives these days, as I don't live in America anymore and am not exposed to the current US English very often, but seeing as how using change is becoming a rare thing, I'm going to guess it may have finally disappeared.

Although it may still survive in phrases where it means cheap when referring to objects or worthless when referring to people.

e.g.,
Forget that two-bit snake-oil salesman.
or
This two-bit hunk of junk is broken again.

Although even those usages of the slang may be dying away.

So now you know. And...

Oh, but there is one more thing. What of computers? As most of you probably know, the smallest unit of information in computers is a bit and 8-bits equals a byte. Kind of strange that it uses the same terminology and grouping of eight to equal the next unit, isn't it?

As far as I have read, no one is quite sure if this was adopted as a nod to the old money usage of bits or not. It seems too much of a coincidence to not have been the case, but we don't know. What we do know is that the computer bit is an abbreviation of "binary digit", introduced in 1948 in a paper Claude Shannon.

Shannon was pretty important in the early days of computers (I had to learn all about him in my computer science classes). He was American so we can be fairly confident that he was aware of the money meaning to the word "bit", as the slang was in regular and common use in those days, yet I can't find any info about if he was ever asked about the similarity in naming. You'd think it would have come up sometime during his life. At any rate, the name may have just been complete coincidence, it might have been a kind of inside joke reference, or he might have been influenced by the money meaning subconsciously. The truth is lost to history.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.