Latin1 was the early default character set for encoding documents delivered via HTTP for MIME types beginning with /text . Today, only around only 1.1% of websites on the internet use the encoding, along with some older appplications. However, it is still the most popular single-byte character encoding scheme in use today. A funny thing about Latin1 encoding is that it maps every byte from 0 to 255 to a valid character. This means that literally any sequence of bytes can be interpreted as a valid string. The main drawback is that it only supports characters from Western European languages. The same is not true for UTF8. Unlike Latin1, UTF8 supports a vastly broader range of characters from different languages and scripts. But as a consequence, not every byte sequence is valid. This fact is due to UTF8's added complexity, using multi-byte sequences for characters beyond the general ASCII range. This is also why you can't just throw any sequence of bytes at it and e...
Why are there sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, yet twenty-four hours in a day? The answer is because modern timekeeping derives from the base-60 number system.
It is believed that Sumerians of Mesopotamia used their phalanges to count. They counted increments of 12 with one hand's four fingers, each of which has three bones, and tracked them with the other hand's five fingers: 12, 24, 36, 48, 60.
Early civilization calendars were often lunisolar, based on the phases of the moon—roughly aware of the sun's yearly 365-day orbit. Though they were somewhat imprecise, many resembled the 12-month calendar we know today. Ancient calendars, however, would often have extra days or months periodically added for alignment purposes.
The Sumerians had no tradition for referring to the length of time we call a "week," nor did they identify months. They simply observed months and years. Later, the Babylonians would put forth the notion of the "week," as well as move to use a solar, rather than lunisolar, calendar.
A history of calendars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars
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