1 Sep
2006
1 Sep
'06
4:31 p.m.
Billy: This brings up a question I had for the group.
In the early =
'60's,
hex was not very popular. And it hadn't become a standard to use A-F. =
I
worked on one hex machine that used lower case i,j,k,l,m,n and another =
that
used upper case U, V, W, X, Y, and Z.
Does anyone remember using any other notations? There must have been =
many
more.
On an ASCII machine, J..O was not unhead-of (for the reason that if you
take the low number of the character you get the appropriate binary
value).
Philips P850-series 'binary' puper tapes were, in fact punched with 4
chaacters to store a word. The top 4 bits of each character were ignored,
the bottom 4 were taken as the nybble value. So 0..9 and J..O was one set
of characters that could be used for this.
I took a C class many years back where the instructor
started out with =
the
statement that all computers use word sizes that are multiples of 8 =
bits. I
That's news to me (and news to many machines I have around here).
couldn't help laughing. After class, I explained
to her why and =
described
the G-15, RPC-4000, etc. I feel a little that way now on the discussion =
of
octal - how soon we forget.
I want to mention to Tony that I've worked on computers for 40+ years =
that
were multiples of 3. And at one time, they were the biggest and the =
Sure. I was a little over-strong with my statement. There were plenty of
3n bit machines, I suspect many list members have one (a PDP8, for
example).
OK, most _modern-ish_ machines have a word length that's a multiple of 4
bits. That's why hex is more popular than octal now, I guess.
-tony