28 Jul
2006
28 Jul
'06
3:50 p.m.
On 7/28/2006 at 2:10 PM Scott Quinn wrote:
It makes much more sense to talk base-2 about computer
things, since
computers operate base-2.
Yes, but talking about "binary" to user of an IBM 650 or 7080 or 1620 is
meaningless, unless you want to be able to read the "blinkenlights". To
the programmer they were purely decimal. And not all used the conventional
8421 representation either. 4421 was not unknown, neither was 4221. (If
you sit down and think about it some, representing the numbers from 0-9 can
be done lots of ways). Binary bit-level manipulation was not possible with
the instruction set.
As far as the programmer was concerned, the internal radix of the system
could have been balanced ternary or sexagesimal.
Cheers,
Chuck