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129-538: Some of the markers of this steady change may be technological, economic, occupational, spatial, cultural, or a combination of all of these. Information society is seen as a successor to industrial society . Closely related concepts are the post-industrial society ( post-fordism ), post-modern society, computer society and knowledge society , telematic society, society of the spectacle ( postmodernism ), Information Revolution and Information Age , network society ( Manuel Castells ) or even liquid modernity . There

258-442: A post-modern type of society. Theoreticians like Ulrich Beck , Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells argue that since the 1970s a transformation from industrial society to informational society has happened on a global scale. As steam power was the technology standing behind industrial society, so information technology is seen as the catalyst for the changes in work organisation, societal structure and politics occurring in

387-461: A quaternary sector of knowledge and information-based services. For these and other reasons, in a post-industrial society, manufacturers can and often do relocate their industrial operations to lower-cost regions in a process known as off-shoring . Measurements of manufacturing industries outputs and economic effect are not historically stable. Traditionally, success has been measured in the number of jobs created . The reduced number of employees in

516-400: A 60-bit word without having to split a byte between one word and the next. If longer bytes were needed, 60 bits would, of course, no longer be ideal. With present applications, 1, 4, and 6 bits are the really important cases.     With 64-bit words, it would often be necessary to make some compromises, such as leaving 4 bits unused in a word when dealing with 6-bit bytes at

645-467: A 64-bit word length for Stretch. It also supports NSA 's requirement for 8-bit bytes. Werner's term "Byte" first popularized in this memo.     NB. This timeline erroneously specifies the birth date of the term "byte" as July 1956 , while Buchholz actually used the term as early as June 1956 .     [...] 60 is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Hence bytes of length from 1 to 6 bits can be packed efficiently into

774-465: A birth certificate. But I am sure that "byte" is coming of age in 1977 with its 21st birthday.     Many have assumed that byte, meaning 8 bits, originated with the IBM System/360, which spread such bytes far and wide in the mid-1960s. The editor is correct in pointing out that the term goes back to the earlier Stretch computer (but incorrect in that Stretch was the first, not

903-565: A complex division of labor with less worker supervision, which may have been incompatible with forced labor. The Industrial Revolution changed warfare, with mass-produced weaponry and supplies, machine-powered transportation, mobilization , the total war concept and weapons of mass destruction . Early instances of industrial warfare were the Crimean War and the American Civil War , but its full potential showed during

1032-476: A convenience, because 1024 is approximately 1000 . This definition was popular in early decades of personal computing , with products like the Tandon 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch DD floppy format (holding 368 640 bytes) being advertised as "360 KB", following the 1024 -byte convention. It was not universal, however. The Shugart SA-400 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk held 109,375 bytes unformatted, and

1161-472: A different location (sending a letter overseas) this has all become a habitual process that we as a society take for granted. However, through the process of sharing information vectors have enabled us to spread information even further. Through the use of these vectors information is able to move and then separate from the initial things that enabled them to move. From here, something called "third nature" has developed. An extension of second nature, third nature

1290-484: A full transmission unit usually additionally includes a start bit, 1 or 2 stop bits, and possibly a parity bit , and thus its size may vary from seven to twelve bits for five to eight bits of actual data. For synchronous communication the error checking usually uses bytes at the end of a frame .     Terms used here to describe the structure imposed by the machine design, in addition to bit , are listed below.      Byte denotes

1419-475: A group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i.e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term

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1548-465: A group of experiences that get made over by culture. They then get remade into something else that can then take on a new meaning. As a society we transform this process so it becomes something natural to us, i.e. second nature. So, by following a particular pattern created by culture we are able to recognise how we use and move information in different ways. From sharing information via different time zones (such as talking online) to information ending up in

1677-433: A highly skilled staff. Today, as industry is an important part of most societies and nations, many governments will have at least some role in planning and regulating industry. This can include issues such as industrial pollution , financing , vocational education , and labour law . In an industrial society, industry employs a major part of the population. This occurs typically in the manufacturing sector. A labour union

1806-431: A human being could move an object. As a result different vectors of people have the ability to not only shape culture but create new possibilities that will ultimately shape society. Therefore, through the use of second nature and third nature society is able to use and explore new vectors of possibility where information can be moulded to create new forms of interaction. In sociology , informational society refers to

1935-492: A large number of professions that involve working with knowledge, and a declining number of jobs that demand low cognitive skills as well as in manufacturing (Stehr 2002a). Also Alvin Toffler argues that knowledge is the central resource in the economy of the information society: "In a Third Wave economy, the central resource – a single word broadly encompassing data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values –

2064-445: A new technological paradigm (he speaks of a mode of development) characterized by "information generation, processing, and transmission" that have become "the fundamental sources of productivity and power" (Castells 2000: 21). The "most decisive historical factor accelerating, channelling and shaping the information technology paradigm, and inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist restructuring undertaken since

2193-406: A number of bits, treated as a unit, and usually representing a character or a part of a character.     NOTES:     1 The number of bits in a byte is fixed for a given data processing system.     2 The number of bits in a byte is usually 8.      We received the following from W Buchholz, one of the individuals who

2322-479: A relationship, or an emotional response" (Hardt/Negri 2005: 108; cf. also 2000: 280-303), or services, cultural products, knowledge (Hardt/Negri 2000: 290). There would be two forms: intellectual labour that produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, etc.; and affective labour that produces and manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion, joy, sadness, etc. (Ibid.). Overall, neo-Marxist accounts of

2451-565: A turn away from Marxism and an end to revolutionary politics. Because of its association with non-Marxist modernization theory and American anticommunist organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom , “industrial society” theory was often criticized by left-wing sociologists and Communists as a liberal ideology that aimed to justify the postwar status quo and undermine opposition to capitalism. However, some left-wing thinkers like André Gorz , Serge Mallet, Herbert Marcuse , and

2580-548: A unit of logarithmic power ratio named after Alexander Graham Bell , creating a conflict with the IEC specification. However, little danger of confusion exists, because the bel is a rarely used unit. It is used primarily in its decadic fraction, the decibel (dB), for signal strength and sound pressure level measurements, while a unit for one-tenth of a byte, the decibyte, and other fractions, are only used in derived units, such as transmission rates. The lowercase letter o for octet

2709-405: A unit which "contains an unspecified amount of information ... capable of holding at least 64 distinct values ... at most 100 distinct values. On a binary computer a byte must therefore be composed of six bits". He notes that "Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits...When we speak of bytes in connection with MIX we shall confine ourselves to

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2838-743: A world power inspired reflection on whether the sociological association of highly-developed industrial economies with capitalism required updating. The transformation of capitalist societies in Europe and the United States to state-managed, regulated welfare capitalism, often with significant sectors of nationalized industry , also contributed to the impression that they might be evolving beyond capitalism, or toward some sort of “convergence” common to all “types” of industrial societies, whether capitalist or communist. State management, automation , bureaucracy , institutionalized collective bargaining , and

2967-668: Is 1024 bytes = 1024 bytes, one mebibyte (1 MiB) is 1024 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes, and so on. In 1999, Donald Knuth suggested calling the kibibyte a "large kilobyte" ( KKB ). The IEC adopted the IUPAC proposal and published the standard in January 1999. The IEC prefixes are part of the International System of Quantities . The IEC further specified that the kilobyte should only be used to refer to 1000 bytes. Lawsuits arising from alleged consumer confusion over

3096-439: Is a capacity for social action. Science would become an immediate productive force, knowledge would no longer be primarily embodied in machines, but already appropriated nature that represents knowledge would be rearranged according to certain designs and programs (Ibid.: 41-46). For Stehr, the economy of a knowledge society is largely driven not by material inputs, but by symbolic or knowledge-based inputs (Ibid.: 67), there would be

3225-446: Is a society where the majority of employees work in information jobs, i.e. they have to deal more with information, signals, symbols, and images than with energy and matter. Radovan Richta (1977) argues that society has been transformed into a scientific civilization based on services, education, and creative activities. This transformation would be the result of a scientific-technological transformation based on technological progress and

3354-422: Is a transition from an economy based on material goods to one based on knowledge. Marc Porat distinguishes a primary (information goods and services that are directly used in the production, distribution or processing of information) and a secondary sector (information services produced for internal consumption by government and non-information firms) of the information economy. Porat uses the total value added by

3483-414: Is actionable knowledge" (Dyson/Gilder/Keyworth/Toffler 1994). At the end of the twentieth century, the concept of the network society gained importance in information society theory. For Manuel Castells , network logic is besides information, pervasiveness, flexibility, and convergence a central feature of the information technology paradigm (2000a: 69ff). "One of the key features of informational society

3612-479: Is an organization of workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in key areas such as wages, hours, and other working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members ( rank and file members) and negotiates labour contracts with employers. This movement first rose among industrial workers. Ancient Mediterranean cultures relied on slavery throughout their economy. While serfdom largely supplanted

3741-510: Is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit .)     A word consists of the number of data bits transmitted in parallel from or to memory in one memory cycle. Word size is thus defined as a structural property of the memory. (The term catena was coined for this purpose by the designers of the Bull GAMMA 60  [ fr ] computer.)      Block refers to

3870-528: Is currently no universally accepted concept of what exactly can be defined as an information society and what shall not be included in the term. Most theoreticians agree that a transformation can be seen as started somewhere between the 1970s, the early 1990s transformations of the Socialist East and the 2000s period that formed most of today's net principles and currently as is changing the way societies work fundamentally. Information technology goes beyond

3999-460: Is defined as eight bits. It is a signed data type, holding values from −128 to 127. .NET programming languages, such as C# , define byte as an unsigned type, and the sbyte as a signed data type, holding values from 0 to 255, and −128 to 127 , respectively. In data transmission systems, the byte is used as a contiguous sequence of bits in a serial data stream, representing the smallest distinguished unit of data. For asynchronous communication

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4128-455: Is defined as the symbol for octet in IEC ;80000-13 and is commonly used in languages such as French and Romanian , and is also combined with metric prefixes for multiples, for example ko and Mo. More than one system exists to define unit multiples based on the byte. Some systems are based on powers of 10 , following the International System of Units (SI), which defines for example

4257-672: Is defined to equal 1,000 bytes—is recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yottabyte (YB), equal to 1000 bytes. The additional prefixes ronna- for 1000 and quetta- for 1000 were adopted by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in 2022. This definition is most commonly used for data-rate units in computer networks , internal bus, hard drive and flash media transfer speeds, and for

4386-618: Is equal to 1,024 (i.e., 2 ) bytes is defined by international standard IEC 80000-13 and is supported by national and international standards bodies ( BIPM , IEC , NIST ). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yobibyte (YiB), equal to 1024 bytes. The natural binary counterparts to ronna- and quetta- were given in a consultation paper of the International Committee for Weights and Measures' Consultative Committee for Units (CCU) as robi- (Ri, 1024 ) and quebi- (Qi, 1024 ), but have not yet been adopted by

4515-526: Is estimated that, the world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, which is the informational equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007. This is the informational equivalent of 60 CD-ROM per person in 2007 and represents a sustained annual growth rate of some 25%. The world's combined technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks

4644-469: Is in control of second nature. It expands on what second nature is limited by. It has the ability to mould information in new and different ways. So, third nature is able to ‘speed up, proliferate, divide, mutate, and beam in on us from elsewhere. It aims to create a balance between the boundaries of space and time (see second nature). This can be seen through the telegraph, it was the first successful technology that could send and receive information faster than

4773-433: Is just as easy to use all six bits in alphanumeric work, or to handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits. All this can be done by pulling the appropriate shift diagonals. An analogous matrix arrangement is used to change from serial to parallel operation at the output of the adder. [...]     byte:     A string that consists of

4902-466: Is often called a nibble , also nybble , which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit. The term octet unambiguously specifies a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions. Historically, the term octad or octade was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin of

5031-500: Is often used by politicians meaning something like "we all do internet now"; the sociological term information society (or informational society) has some deeper implications about change of societal structure. Because we lack political control of intellectual property, we are lacking in a concrete map of issues, an analysis of costs and benefits, and functioning political groups that are unified by common interests representing different opinions of this diverse situation that are prominent in

5160-636: Is some evidence, however, that even in ancient times, large economies such as the Roman empire or Chinese Han dynasty had developed factories for more centralized production in certain industries. With the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing sector became a major part of European and North American economies, both in terms of labor and production, contributing possibly a third of all economic activity. Along with rapid advances in technology, such as steam power and mass steel production,

5289-399: Is that in postindustrial society all of the economic system is the object of intervention of society upon itself. That is why we can call it the programmed society, because this phrase captures its capacity to create models of management, production, organization, distribution, and consumption, so that such a society appears, at all its functional levels, as the product of an action exercised by

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5418-400: Is that they create the impression that we have entered a completely new type of society. "If there is just more information then it is hard to understand why anyone should suggest that we have before us something radically new" (Webster 2002a: 259). Critics such as Frank Webster argue that these approaches stress discontinuity, as if contemporary society had nothing in common with society as it

5547-460: Is the main element that characterizes it. Thus, in this type of society, the vast majority of it will be dedicated to the provision of services and said services will consist of the processing, distribution or use of information. The growth of the amount of technologically mediated information has been quantified in different ways, including society's technological capacity to store information, to communicate information, and to compute information. It

5676-565: Is the networking logic of its basic structure, which explains the use of the concept of 'network society'" (Castells 2000: 21). "As an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture" (Castells 2000: 500). For Castells

5805-457: Is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (ie, different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit. )      System/360 took over many of

5934-597: The IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers , June 1959, page 121. The notions of that paper were elaborated in Chapter 4 of Planning a Computer System (Project Stretch) , edited by W Buchholz, McGraw-Hill Book Company (1962). The rationale for coining the term was explained there on page 40 as follows: Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character

6063-649: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) as the Federal Information Processing Standard , which replaced the incompatible teleprinter codes in use by different branches of the U.S. government and universities during the 1960s. ASCII included the distinction of upper- and lowercase alphabets and a set of control characters to facilitate the transmission of written language as well as printing device functions, such as page advance and line feed, and

6192-555: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States (and similar legislation elsewhere) which make copy protection (see Digital rights management ) circumvention illegal, to the free software , open source and copyleft movements, which seek to encourage and disseminate the "freedom" of various information products (traditionally both as in "gratis" or free of cost, and liberty, as in freedom to use, explore and share). Caveat: Information society

6321-538: The Frankfurt School used aspects of industrial society theory in their critiques of capitalism. Exabytes 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 and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures . To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from

6450-626: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry 's (IUPAC) Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols attempted to resolve this ambiguity by proposing a set of binary prefixes for the powers of 1024, including kibi (kilobinary), mebi (megabinary), and gibi (gigabinary). In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by adopting the IUPAC's proposed prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, etc.) to unambiguously denote powers of 1024. Thus one kibibyte (1 KiB)

6579-518: The deregulation of the welfare state and of labour rights , the lowering of wages, welfare, etc. Concepts such as knowledge society, information society, network society, informational capitalism, postindustrial society, transnational network capitalism, postmodern society, etc. show that there is a vivid discussion in contemporary sociology on the character of contemporary society and the role that technologies, information, communication, and co-operation play in it. Information society theory discusses

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6708-430: The internet , as the principles of internet design and usage influence other areas, and there are discussions about how big the influence of specific media or specific modes of production really is. Frank Webster notes five major types of information that can be used to define information society: technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural. According to Webster, the character of information has transformed

6837-507: The knowledge industry . He began studying the effects of patents on research before distinguishing five sectors of the knowledge sector: education, research and development, mass media, information technologies, information services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959 29% per cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge industries. Peter Drucker has argued that there

6966-574: The pre-modern , pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies , and may be succeeded by an information society . They are often contrasted with traditional societies . Industrial societies use external energy sources, such as fossil fuels , to increase the rate and scale of production. The production of food is shifted to large commercial farms where the products of industry, such as combine harvesters and fossil fuel-based fertilizers , are used to decrease required human labor while increasing production. No longer needed for

7095-455: The service industry can provide labor to workers and those that benefit financially from them, in exchange for a piece of production profits with which they can buy goods. This leads to the rise of very large cities and surrounding suburb areas with a high rate of economic activity . These urban centers require the input of external energy sources in order to overcome the diminishing returns of agricultural consolidation, due partially to

7224-529: The world wars . See also military-industrial complex , arms industries , military industry and modern warfare . “Industrial society” took on a more specific meaning after World War II in the context of the Cold War , the internationalization of sociology through organizations like UNESCO , and the spread of American industrial relations to Europe. The cementation of the Soviet Union ’s position as

7353-437: The 1980s, so that the new techno-economic system can be adequately characterized as informational capitalism" (Castells 2000: 18). Castells has added to theories of the information society the idea that in contemporary society dominant functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks that constitute the new social morphology of society (Castells 2000: 500). Nicholas Garnham is critical of Castells and argues that

7482-512: The Adder. The Adder may accept all or only some of the bits.     Assume that it is desired to operate on 4 bit decimal digits , starting at the right. The 0-diagonal is pulsed first, sending out the six bits 0 to 5, of which the Adder accepts only the first four (0-3). Bits 4 and 5 are ignored. Next, the 4 diagonal is pulsed. This sends out bits 4 to 9, of which the last two are again ignored, and so on.     It

7611-515: The IEC and ISO. An alternative system of nomenclature for the same units (referred to here as the customary convention ), in which 1 kilobyte (KB) is equal to 1,024 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) is equal to 1024 bytes and 1 gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1024 bytes is mentioned by a 1990s JEDEC standard. Only the first three multiples (up to GB) are mentioned by the JEDEC standard, which makes no mention of TB and larger. While confusing and incorrect,

7740-512: The Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word , coming from Memory in parallel, into characters , or 'bytes' as we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially. The 60 bits are dumped into magnetic cores on six different levels. Thus, if a 1 comes out of position 9, it appears in all six cores underneath. Pulsing any diagonal line will send the six bits stored along that line to

7869-478: The Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes, which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum, and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing.     Since then the term byte has generally meant 8 bits, and it has thus passed into the general vocabulary.     Are there any other terms coined especially for

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7998-631: The System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different. In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony on long-distance trunk lines . These used the eight-bit μ-law encoding . This large investment promised to reduce transmission costs for eight-bit data. In Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming (first published in 1968), Donald Knuth uses byte in his hypothetical MIX computer to denote

8127-696: The Western capitalist and Soviet-style communist societies. Other sociologists, including Daniel Bell , Reinhard Bendix , Ralf Dahrendorf , Georges Friedmann , Seymour Martin Lipset , and Alain Touraine , used similar ideas in their own work, though with sometimes very different definitions and emphases. The principal notions of industrial-society theory were also commonly expressed in the ideas of reformists in European social-democratic parties who advocated

8256-617: The basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of social, political and economic practices. (…) The second, arguably more intriguing, characteristic of network societies is the reproduction and institutionalization throughout (and between) those societies of networks as the basic form of human organization and relationship across a wide range of social, political and economic configurations and associations". The major critique of concepts such as information society, postmodern society, knowledge society, network society, postindustrial society, etc. that has mainly been voiced by critical scholars

8385-539: The basis for implementation and follow-up in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society. In particular, the Tunis Agenda addresses the issues of financing of ICTs for development and Internet governance that could not be resolved in the first phase. Some people, such as Antonio Negri , characterize the information society as one in which people do immaterial labour. By this, they appear to refer to

8514-435: The basis of the information economy. However, such control can prove to be both technically and socially problematic. Technically because copy protection is often easily circumvented and socially rejected because the users and citizens of the information society can prove to be unwilling to accept such absolute commodification of the facts and information that compose their environment. Responses to this concern range from

8643-591: The binary and decimal definitions of multiples of the byte have generally ended in favor of the manufacturers, with courts holding that the legal definition of gigabyte or GB is 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 (10 ) bytes (the decimal definition), rather than the binary definition (2 , i.e., 1 073 741 824 ). Specifically, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that "the U.S. Congress has deemed

8772-455: The bottom of the market. It is now common for publishers to promote only their best selling authors and to try to avoid the rest—even if they still sell steadily. Films are becoming more and more judged, in terms of distribution, by their first weekend's performance, in many cases cutting out opportunity for word-of-mouth development. Michael Buckland characterizes information in society in his book Information and Society. Buckland expresses

8901-452: The capacities of most storage media , particularly hard drives , flash -based storage, and DVDs . Operating systems that use this definition include macOS , iOS , Ubuntu , and Debian . It is also consistent with the other uses of the SI prefixes in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance . A system of units based on powers of 2 in which 1 kibibyte (KiB)

9030-687: The capacity to process and generate information for efficient society functioning. Jean-François Lyotard has argued that "knowledge has become the principle [ sic ] force of production over the last few decades". Knowledge would be transformed into a commodity. Lyotard says that postindustrial society makes knowledge accessible to the layman because knowledge and information technologies would diffuse into society and break up Grand Narratives of centralized structures and groups. Lyotard denotes these changing circumstances as postmodern condition or postmodern society. Similarly to Bell, Peter Otto and Philipp Sonntag (1985) say that an information society

9159-530: The common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol ( RFC   791 ) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet . Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness . The size of the byte has historically been hardware -dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code

9288-453: The computer field which have found their way into general dictionaries of English language?     1956 Summer: Gerrit Blaauw , Fred Brooks , Werner Buchholz , John Cocke and Jim Pomerene join the Stretch team. Lloyd Hunter provides transistor leadership.     1956 July [ sic ]: In a report Werner Buchholz lists the advantages of

9417-648: The continuities that characterise change. In this way Webster distinguishes between different epochs of capitalism: laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century, corporate capitalism in the 20th century, and informational capitalism for the 21st century (kasiwulaya 2006). For describing contemporary society based on a new dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, other critical scholars have suggested several terms like: Other scholars prefer to speak of information capitalism (Morris-Suzuki 1997) or informational capitalism ( Manuel Castells 2000, Christian Fuchs 2005, Schmiede 2006a, b). Manuel Castells sees informationalism as

9546-635: The customary convention is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system and random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, and in marketing and billing by telecommunication companies, such as Vodafone , AT&T , Orange and Telstra . For storage capacity, the customary convention was used by macOS and iOS through Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iOS 10, after which they switched to units based on powers of 10. Various computer vendors have coined terms for data of various sizes, sometimes with different sizes for

9675-454: The decimal definition of gigabyte to be the 'preferred' one for the purposes of 'U.S. trade and commerce' [...] The California Legislature has likewise adopted the decimal system for all 'transactions in this state. ' " Earlier lawsuits had ended in settlement with no court ruling on the question, such as a lawsuit against drive manufacturer Western Digital . Western Digital settled the challenge and added explicit disclaimers to products that

9804-454: The early industrial period (1740-1830)” (p. 174) “Even with enhanced feedback control, industry could not have developed without the enhanced means to process matter and energy, not only as inputs of the raw materials of production but also as outputs distributed to final consumption.”(p. 175) One of the first people to develop the concept of the information society was the economist Fritz Machlup . In 1933, Fritz Machlup began studying

9933-411: The effect of patents on research. His work culminated in the study The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States in 1962. This book was widely regarded and was eventually translated into Russian and Japanese . The Japanese have also studied the information society (or jōhōka shakai , 情報化社会 ). The issue of technologies and their role in contemporary society have been discussed in

10062-564: The end state towards which we are evolving. The Information Revolution relates with the well-known terms agricultural revolution and Industrial Revolution . One of the central paradoxes of the information society is that it makes information easily reproducible, leading to a variety of freedom/control problems relating to intellectual property . Essentially, business and capital, whose place becomes that of producing and selling information and knowledge, seems to require control over this new resource so that it can effectively be managed and sold as

10191-407: The fastest growth rate of over 60% per year during the last two decades. James R. Beniger describes the necessity of information in modern society in the following way: “The need for sharply increased control that resulted from the industrialization of material processes through application of inanimate sources of energy probably accounts for the rapid development of automatic feedback technology in

10320-568: The former is the decline in carriage manufacturing when the automobile was mass-produced. A recent trend has been the migration of prosperous, industrialized nations towards a post-industrial society . This has come with a major shift in labor and production away from manufacturing and towards the service sector , a process dubbed tertiarization . Additionally, since the late 20th century, rapid changes in communication and information technology (sometimes called an information revolution ) have allowed sections of some economies to specialize in

10449-473: The former sense of the word, harking back to the days when bytes were not yet standardized." The development of eight-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. Microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 , the direct predecessor of the 8086 , could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity

10578-434: The household and most other manufacturing was carried out in smaller workshops by artisans with limited specialization or machinery. In Europe during the late Middle Ages, artisans in many towns formed guilds to self-regulate their trades and collectively pursue their business interests. Economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie has suggested the guilds further restrained the quality and productivity of manufacturing. There

10707-587: The idea that information can be interpreted differently from person to person based on that individual's experiences. Considering that metaphors and technologies of information move forward in a reciprocal relationship, we can describe some societies (especially the Japanese society ) as an information society because we think of it as such. The word information may be interpreted in many different ways. According to Buckland in Information and Society , most of

10836-482: The increasing importance of computer technology. Science and technology would become immediate forces of production (Aristovnik 2014: 55). Nico Stehr (1994, 2002a, b) says that in the knowledge society a majority of jobs involves working with knowledge. "Contemporary society may be described as a knowledge society based on the extensive penetration of all its spheres of life and institutions by scientific and technological knowledge" (Stehr 2002b: 18). For Stehr, knowledge

10965-422: The industrial society paradigm strong resemblances to modernization theory , which achieved major influence in social science in the context of postwar decolonization and the development of post-colonial states. The French sociologist Raymond Aron , who gave the most developed definition to the concept of “industrial society” in the 1950s, used the term as a comparative method to identify common features of

11094-459: The information economy. For Daniel Bell the number of employees producing services and information is an indicator for the informational character of a society. "A post-industrial society is based on services. (…) What counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information. (…) A post industrial society is one in which the majority of those employed are not involved in the production of tangible goods". Alain Touraine already spoke in 1971 of

11223-416: The information society have in common that they stress that knowledge, information technologies, and computer networks have played a role in the restructuration and globalization of capitalism and the emergence of a flexible regime of accumulation ( David Harvey 1989). They warn that new technologies are embedded into societal antagonisms that cause structural unemployment , rising poverty, social exclusion ,

11352-544: The information society. Industrial society In sociology , an industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology and machinery to enable mass production , supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour . Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution , and replaced the agrarian societies of

11481-566: The input and output. However, the LINK Computer can be equipped to edit out these gaps and to permit handling of bytes which are split between words. [...]     [...] The maximum input-output byte size for serial operation will now be 8 bits, not counting any error detection and correction bits. Thus, the Exchange will operate on an 8-bit byte basis, and any input-output units with less than 8 bits per byte will leave

11610-428: The instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit . Another origin of byte for bit groups smaller than a computer's word size, and in particular groups of four bits , is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957, which

11739-418: The integral data type unsigned char must hold at least 256 different values, and is represented by at least eight bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1). Various implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte. In addition, the C and C++ standards require that there are no gaps between two bytes. This means every bit in memory is part of a byte. Java's primitive data type byte

11868-447: The lack of nearby arable land , associated transportation and storage costs, and are otherwise unsustainable. This makes the reliable availability of the needed energy resources high priority in industrial government policies. Prior to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America, followed by further industrialization throughout the world in the 20th century, most economies were largely agrarian. Basics were often made within

11997-465: The last, of IBM's second-generation transistorized computers to be developed).     The first reference found in the files was contained in an internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch . A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use

12126-437: The late 20th century. In the book Future Shock , Alvin Toffler used the phrase super-industrial society to describe this type of society. Other writers and thinkers have used terms like " post-industrial society " and "post-modern industrial society" with a similar meaning. A number of terms in current use emphasize related but different aspects of the emerging global economic order. The Information Society intends to be

12255-399: The latter's account is technologically determinist because Castells points out that his approach is based on a dialectic of technology and society in which technology embodies society and society uses technology (Castells 2000: 5sqq). But Castells also makes clear that the rise of a new "mode of development" is shaped by capitalist production, i.e. by society, which implies that technology isn't

12384-408: The manufacturing sector has been assumed to result from a decline in the competitiveness of the sector, or the introduction of the lean manufacturing process. Related to this change is the upgrading of the quality of the product being manufactured. While it is possible to produce a low-technology product with low-skill labour, the ability to manufacture high-technology products well is dependent on

12513-419: The meanings fall into three categories of human knowledge: information as knowledge, information as a process, and information as a thing. Thus, the Information Society refers to the social importance given to communication and information in today's society, where social, economic and cultural relations are involved. In the Information Society, the process of capturing, processing and communicating information

12642-480: The most encompassing in that an economy is a subset of a society. The Information Age is somewhat limiting, in that it refers to a 30-year period between the widespread use of computers and the knowledge economy , rather than an emerging economic order. The knowledge era is about the nature of the content, not the socioeconomic processes by which it will be traded. The computer revolution , and knowledge revolution refer to specific revolutionary transitions, rather than

12771-590: The nervous system of society, whereas Castells links the concept of the network society to capitalist transformation, Van Dijk sees it as the logical result of the increasing widening and thickening of networks in nature and society. Darin Barney uses the term for characterizing societies that exhibit two fundamental characteristics: "The first is the presence in those societies of sophisticated – almost exclusively digital – technologies of networked communication and information management/distribution, technologies which form

12900-481: The network society is the result of informationalism, a new technological paradigm. Jan Van Dijk (2006) defines the network society as a "social formation with an infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its prime mode of organization at all levels (individual, group/organizational and societal). Increasingly, these networks link all units or parts of this formation (individuals, groups and organizations)" (Van Dijk 2006: 20). For Van Dijk networks have become

13029-404: The new manufacturing drastically reconfigured previously mercantile and feudal economies. Even today, industrial manufacturing is significant to many developed and semi-developed economies. Historically certain manufacturing industries have gone into a decline due to various economic factors, including the development of replacement technology or the loss of competitive advantage. An example of

13158-455: The number of words transmitted to or from an input-output unit in response to a single input-output instruction. Block size is a structural property of an input-output unit; it may have been fixed by the design or left to be varied by the program.     [...] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long.     Figure 2 shows

13287-501: The only driving force of society. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that contemporary society is an Empire that is characterized by a singular global logic of capitalist domination that is based on immaterial labour. With the concept of immaterial labour Negri and Hardt introduce ideas of information society discourse into their Marxist account of contemporary capitalism. Immaterial labour would be labour "that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication,

13416-460: The physical or logical control of data flow over the transmission media. 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 (EBCDIC), an expansion of their six-bit binary-coded decimal (BCDIC) representations used in earlier card punches. The prominence of

13545-418: The post-industrial society. "The passage to postindustrial society takes place when investment results in the production of symbolic goods that modify values, needs, representations, far more than in the production of material goods or even of 'services'. Industrial society had transformed the means of production: post-industrial society changes the ends of production, that is, culture. (…) The decisive point here

13674-458: The potential ambiguity of the term "byte". The symbol for octet, 'o', also conveniently eliminates the ambiguity in the symbol 'B' between byte and bel . The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in

13803-490: The practice in Europe during the Middle Ages, several European powers reintroduced slavery extensively in the early modern period , particularly for the harshest labor in their colonies . The Industrial revolution played a central role in the later abolition of slavery , partly because domestic manufacturing's new economic dominance undercut interests in the slave trade . Additionally, the new industrial methods required

13932-453: The prefix kilo as 1000 (10 ); other systems are based on powers of 2 . Nomenclature for these systems has led to confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 use standard SI prefixes ( kilo , mega , giga , ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes ( kibi , mebi , gibi , ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) or they might use

14061-525: The prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity when the prefixes M or G are used. While the difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is relatively small for the kilobyte (about 2% smaller than the kibibyte), the systems deviate increasingly as units grow larger (the relative deviation grows by 2.4% for each three orders of magnitude). For example, a power-of-10-based terabyte is about 9% smaller than power-of-2-based tebibyte. Definition of prefixes using powers of 10—in which 1 kilobyte (symbol kB)

14190-415: The primary and secondary information sector to the GNP as an indicator for the information economy. The OECD has employed Porat's definition for calculating the share of the information economy in the total economy (e.g. OECD 1981, 1986). Based on such indicators, the information society has been defined as a society where more than half of the GNP is produced and more than half of the employees are active in

14319-406: The production of food, excess labor is moved into these factories where mechanization is utilized to further increase efficiency. As populations grow, and mechanization is further refined, often to the level of automation , many workers shift to expanding service industries . Industrial society makes urbanization desirable, in part so that workers can be closer to centers of production, and

14448-476: The production of knowledge or cultural artifacts. One problem with this model is that it ignores the material and essentially industrial basis of the society. However it does point to a problem for workers, namely how many creative people does this society need to function? For example, it may be that you only need a few star performers, rather than a plethora of non-celebrities, as the work of those performers can be easily distributed, forcing all secondary players to

14577-491: The rise of the tertiary sector were taken as common markers of industrial society. The “industrial society” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s was strongly marked by the unprecedented economic growth in Europe and the United States after World War II, and drew heavily on the work of economists like Colin Clark , John Kenneth Galbraith , W.W. Rostow , and Jean Fourastié . The fusion of sociology with development economics gave

14706-471: The role of information and information technology in society, the question which key concepts shall be used for characterizing contemporary society, and how to define such concepts. It has become a specific branch of contemporary sociology. Information society is the means of sending and receiving information from one place to another. As technology has advanced so too has the way people have adapted in sharing information with each other. "Second nature" refers

14835-450: The same term even within a single vendor. These terms include double word , half word , long word , quad word , slab , superword and syllable . There are also informal terms. e.g., half byte and nybble for 4 bits, octal K for 1000 8 . Contemporary computer memory has a binary architecture making a definition of memory units based on powers of 2 most practical. The use of the metric prefix kilo for binary multiples arose as

14964-404: The scientific literature using a range of labels and concepts. This section introduces some of them. Ideas of a knowledge or information economy , post-industrial society , postmodern society, network society , the information revolution , informational capitalism, network capitalism, and the like, have been debated over the last several decades. Fritz Machlup (1962) introduced the concept of

15093-555: The society itself, and not as the outcome of natural laws or cultural specificities" (Touraine 1988: 104). In the programmed society also the area of cultural reproduction including aspects such as information, consumption, health, research, education would be industrialized. That modern society is increasing its capacity to act upon itself means for Touraine that society is reinvesting ever larger parts of production and so produces and transforms itself. This makes Touraine's concept substantially different from that of Daniel Bell who focused on

15222-585: The term byte became common. The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in

15351-535: The term is unclear, but it can be found in British, Dutch, and German sources of the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the documentation of Philips mainframe computers. The unit symbol for the byte is specified in IEC 80000-13 , IEEE 1541 and the Metric Interchange Format as the upper-case character B. In the International System of Quantities (ISQ), B is also the symbol of the bel ,

15480-532: The ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Internationally, the unit octet explicitly defines a sequence of eight bits, eliminating

15609-425: The usable capacity may differ from the advertised capacity. Seagate was sued on similar grounds and also settled. Many programming languages define the data type byte . The C and C++ programming languages define byte as an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment" (clause 3.6 of the C standard). The C standard requires that

15738-493: The way that we live today. How we conduct ourselves centers around theoretical knowledge and information. Kasiwulaya and Gomo (Makerere University) allude that information societies are those that have intensified their use of IT for economic, social, cultural and political transformation. In 2005, governments reaffirmed their dedication to the foundations of the Information Society in the Tunis Commitment and outlined

15867-660: Was 100 or 150 years ago. Such assumptions would have ideological character because they would fit with the view that we can do nothing about change and have to adapt to existing political realities (kasiwulaya 2002b: 267). These critics argue that contemporary society first of all is still a capitalist society oriented towards accumulating economic, political, and cultural capital . They acknowledge that information society theories stress some important new qualities of society (notably globalization and informatization), but charge that they fail to show that these are attributes of overall capitalist structures. Critics such as Webster insist on

15996-404: Was advertised as "110 Kbyte", using the 1000 convention. Likewise, the 8-inch DEC RX01 floppy (1975) held 256 256 bytes formatted, and was advertised as "256k". Some devices were advertised using a mixture of the two definitions: most notably, floppy disks advertised as "1.44 MB" have an actual capacity of 1440 KiB , the equivalent of 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. In 1995,

16125-444: Was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes, and persisted, in legacy systems, into the twenty-first century. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables or slab , before

16254-523: Was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time. The possibility of going to 8-bit bytes was considered in August 1956 and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly thereafter .     The first published reference to the term occurred in 1959 in a paper ' Processing Data in Bits and Pieces ' by G A Blaauw , F P Brooks Jr and W Buchholz in

16383-530: Was jointly developed by Rand , MIT, and IBM. Later on, Schwartz's language JOVIAL actually used the term, but the author recalled vaguely that it was derived from AN/FSQ-31 . Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary-coded decimal (BCD) representations and the six-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army ( FIELDATA ) and Navy . These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to seven bits of coding, called

16512-642: Was the informational equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day in 2007. The world's combined effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunications networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000, and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, which is the informational equivalent of 6 newspapers per person per day in 2007. The world's technological capacity to compute information with humanly guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10^8 MIPS in 1986, to 6.4 x 10^12 MIPS in 2007, experiencing

16641-473: Was working on IBM's Project Stretch in the mid 1950s. His letter tells the story.     Not being a regular reader of your magazine, I heard about the question in the November 1976 issue regarding the origin of the term "byte" from a colleague who knew that I had perpetrated this piece of jargon [see page 77 of November 1976 BYTE, "Olde Englishe"] . I searched my files and could not locate

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