4 IWrite out and Submit The first electronic word processor

4. IWrite out and Submit] The first electronic word processor, the Wang 1200, could let the user edit one line of text at a time before that text was printed or stored on a cassette tape. Each line of text was stored in 100 Bytes, and was 100 characters long. a. How many bits were used to store each character? b. How many different combinations of bits can you get from your answer to part a? This is the number of different symbols the Wang 1200 can have for each character in its editor c. How many bits would it take to represent all of the lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet used for English? d. What about upper and lower case? e. What about all of the letters, numbers, and punctuation on your computer\'s keyboard? Space, Enter and Tab can all count as one symbol. Don\'t forget to show your work. Your answers might be different from your work partners\', as some keyboards may have a few different keys.

Solution

a. How many bits were used to store each character?
Given: Each line of text was stored in 100 bytes.
   Line is 100 characters long.
So, each character takes 100 / 100 = 1 byte i.e., 8 bits were used to store each character.

b. How many different combinations of bits can you get from your answer to part a.
As, each character is stored in 8 bits, the different combinations of bits is: 2^8 = 256
different combinations are possible for each character.

c. How many bits would it take to represent all of the lower case letters in the Latin alphabet
used for English?
There are 26 latin alphabets in English. And therefore, 5 bits will suffice to represent
just the lower case alphabets as 2^5 = 32, and ofcourse 4 bits will be a bit less 2^4 = 16.
Therefore, it takes 5 bits to store lower case alphabets.

d. What about upper and lower case?
When it comes to both cases, there will be a total of 26 + 26 = 52 alphabets.
And therefore, 6 bits will suffice for this one. This is because 2^6 = 64 combinations.

e. What about all of the letters, numbers, and punctuation on your computers keyboard?
I have a 128-key keyboard, and ofcourse, each key represents a unique character.
Therefore, to represent a total of 128 keys, I need a total of 7 bits to represent the
character set. This is because, 2^7 = 128.