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Re: for the TRULY geeky!

There were a bunch of 36 bit machines, including the DEC PDP-10

Naturally Octal was the notation of choice. Since I did most of my early 
professional work on these puppies, I'm am most at home in Octal.

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Allen S. Firstenberg" <>
To: <>
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 1:00 AM
Subject: Re: for the TRULY geeky!

> 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
> 
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