Quote:
Originally Posted by red-beard
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....
To quote Tom Lehrer:
"Base 8 is just like Base 10..........If you're missing two fingers...."
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Or the old standard geek corollary: "There are only 10 types of folks in the world...those that understand binary, and those that don't"
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For years I was a mainframe guy too (IBMs however), and hexidecimal was just a two digit "user friendly" way to express binary strings...I got pretty damn good at doing hex arithmetic in my head back then. I sure missed the "early days", but don't miss IT (as it evolved in later years w/ the corporate bs) nary a bit...