Quote:
Originally Posted by masraum
No, I got what you were saying. I was saying that "octal" was unusual. I get 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10.... I'd just never heard of anything but base 2, 10, or 16 mentioned in any sort of practical application.
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Computers were different in the stone-age days...
This was on 1970's mainframe equipment, PR1ME specifically. I know when I worked on DEC PDP-11, Octal was common.
I think the ASCII we used then was OCTAL, using only 2 numbers to represent 64 characters. There were only uppercase letters, numbers and a lot of the symbols were not there. The 128 and then 256 character ASCII were "extended" ASCII.
I remember handing in a typewritten english assignment and the teacher, #1 hated it because it was all uppercase, #2, was convinced "the computer" helped me write the assignment.
I seem to remember that the world changed when we got rid of the PR1ME 300 and replaced it with a later model which used 128 character ASCII.
To quote Tom Lehrer:
"Base 8 is just like Base 10..........If you're missing two fingers...."
Edit - the 64 Character ASCII we used was a subset of the 128 character ASCII.