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Re: for the TRULY geeky!

I must point out that most math geeks don't do much at all with bases
other than base 10, and that its almost exclusively programmers and other
computer geeks...

--
Russell Kohn

What was done,
Is past and gone,
Never to come back,
Again.

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Mike & Kerry Gigante wrote:

: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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