MSB by James Pate Williams, Jr., BA, BS, MSwE, PhD

In computer architecture, a branch of computer science, the initials MSB stand for most significant byte of a multiple byte computer word. Suppose you have a 16-bit word the MSB can be either the leftmost byte of the rightmost byte. The order of the bytes is significant and determine whether the computer word belongs to a big endian or little-endian processor. Incidentally, a byte is generally eight bits nowadays. A byte can represent either 0 to 255 or -128 to 127 depending on whether it is unsigned or signed, respectively. So much of this simple lesson.

More importantly, MSB are the initials of someone I miss terribly and would like to get to know better. She is like Dr. Yvonne Marie Greene, MD, a former psychiatrist of mine with whom I experienced transference for the first time in the period 2005 to 2007. Both Yvonne and MSB ran away from me when things were just getting interesting. If “You can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” to quote Stephen Stills. I guess I always have Zoosk since I missed finding a mate in high school and college, etc.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

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