On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 12:38:45AM +1100, Neale Green wrote: > Welll, there are still 8 bit processors in use out there, I started in Octal > through Tandems ( based on HP Minis ), because it's still the addressing > used in the O/S utilities, but Hex is certainly more common nowadays. Well, even 8 bit processors aren't well represented with octal. Octal only represents 3 bits. My guess (and its only a guess) is that octal dates from systems where either 3, 6, or 9 bits were the byte size. 8 bits were not standardized until the IBM 360. Octal is also well represented in UNIX where permissions are represented as sets of three bits, with a few leftover. Meanwhile, Hex uses 4 bits, which lets processors with an 8 bit byte represent things to humans as two hexdigits Using base 32 "digits" would only represent 5 bits. 64 "digits" would only represent 6, and so on. Don't confuse byte size or word size with the radix. Allen -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
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