26 Jun
2004
26 Jun
'04
8:10 a.m.
"What
significant advantage did octal have over hex notation
(especially in the late '60s timeframe)?"
I'm a bit skeptical of the
printer-hardware answer. Printing
calculators don't care about notation, only humans do. Historically, eg. before computers, characters were
logically defined
in six positions --
Another reason to group bits in threes: three divides six, so character
boundaries fall on digit boundaries (ie, the question that started this
thread off would not arise under such a system).
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