30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
8:50 p.m.
On Wednesday 30 August 2006 07:34 pm, Alexey Toptygin wrote:
On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
wrote:
And in addition to which I would guess that it's always been easier to get
devices (including both display devices and decoder chips and whatnot) that
will display all octal digits than will display hex characters...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
Someones signiture (the "real programmers
get confused as Oct 31 = Dec 25") reminded
me about Octal.
I have heard of it, and know it's still used
on the Calculator program on Windoze (2K),
on the computers at work, but unlike Hex,
Dec and Binary I have no idea what it could
be used for, and why it would still be used
today. Anyone care to fill in the gaps, please?
To write down integers, perhaps? Hex is nice if your bits come in
multiples of 4; octal is nice if your bits come in multiples of 3. People
on this list claim to have computers with 12, 18, 24, 36, and 48 bit
registers, IIRC.