256 - Day of the Programmer
Today (9/13/2021) is the 256th day of the year, which means it’s National Day of the Programmer.
Why the number 256? Well, it stems back to the days of 8-bit technology with the first generation of home computers (Apple, Commodore 64). Computer programming is based off of 1’s and 0’s. Two, when put to the 8th power, gives you 256. A single memory location could store a value between 0 and 255. To this day, computers continue to convert everything into 1’s and 0’s, this is also known as ‘binary’. This all equals 1 byte, which is the smallest measurement for a piece of memory.