2 Jun
2010
2 Jun
'10
12:52 p.m.
From: Andrew Burton
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 10:23 AM
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <RichA at vulcan.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2010 8:32 PM
> From: Chuck Guzis
> Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2010 6:04 PM
> Is Andrew thinking of the sexagesimal (base 60)
system? That arose in
> Mesopotamia a millennium or more prior to the Romans.
No it was definately sexadecimal. I remember it,
because a) it was
(apparently) invented by a famous mathematician around 1850 and b) IBM
replaced 'sex' (latin for 6) with 'hex' (greek for 6). Perhaps it was
more
misinformation on the internet, or perhaps a case of if it isn't on
Wikipedia then it ain't true. I'm hoping it's the former.
OK, I did a little research on this via Google. "Sexadecimal" is cited
in a number of on-line dictionaries as a synonym for "hexadecimal", and
there is a cite on one page indicating that Bendix used the term in
documentation. However, "hexadecimal" dates from 1954 and is considered
to be perfectly good scientific nomenclature in form (mixed Greek and
Latin roots, and all that).
I also ran across the 1862 book on "tonal" math, written by an engineer
who created an adding machine c. 1850. This involved adding 6 symbols
to the usual 10, placing one between "8" and "9" to represent the
value
9, and assigning the value 10 to the symbol "9". He also assigned
monosyllabic names to each number from 1 to 16 (the latter being "ton")
so that each number could be pronounced as a (possibly very long) word.
I sincerely doubt that this influenced the development of hexadecimal
math to any great degree.
All very interesting stuff. How did you come to know
all this Rich?
As I noted in my response to Ben, I'm an Indo-Europeanist by training.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/