2 ms·

There's a story about Grace Hopper, who learned octal for the BINAC. She later had problems balancing her checkbook before she realized she was doing so in octa

There's a story about Grace Hopper, who learned octal for the BINAC. She later had problems balancing her checkbook before she realized she was doing so in octal. That lead her to conclude it would be better to teach the computer to handle decimal than to force everyone to use octal. A lot of the old systems used 6-bit character codes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code ), including BCD six-bit codes, making 6*n word sizes more appropriate.

gumby 4y ago
My dad used to give me maths problems when I was little but tell me to solve them in specific bases (typically decimal, octal or hex, but not always). Doing long division by hand in hex gives you a feel for how the numbers relate. The anecdote about decimal makes sense — she was the key to the design of COBOL. I used quite a few machines with six bit characters into the mid 1980s.