Sitting in my lab right now, I've got a British sci-fi TV show fromSeptember 1967 playing behind me, and I observed one of the characterstalking about [quasi] Boolean logic being performed on hexadecimalnumbers. At least, he spoke a couple of numbers that would be valid hexbytes :)When did people start using hex in normal conversations? I associatethe late 60s and early 70s more with octal.

Un bel giorno larwe digitò:In "normal conversations"? Never, I would say. At least, I've never heard aconversation at the supermarket like: "Can you give me 0xC eggs?". :-)--

Bendix was more traditional before IBM. Check out -- Thad

Semi-OT: When did hexadecimal come into common use?

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Rube Bumpkin 19 years ago

Ignoring the issue of "normal conversation", it must be before 1973 or so. I was a COBOL programmer back then, and I still have some of my IBM IBM 360/370 "cheat cards". In around 1965, I remember hearing about base

12, duodecimal, (referencing Hammurabi?), and in 1967, we covered various bases in math class. I don't remember if we went to base 16, but I'm sure we didn't cover it in the context of a shorthand for binary.

I remember writing an EBCDIC-to-ASCII converter in COBOL, then later writing an ASCII-to-Baudot(6 bit)-to-ASCII converter in PL/M.

I hate being old...

RB

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Alan Myler 19 years ago

Someone wished my wife a happy 0x28 birthday last year!

dalai lamah wrote:

rd a

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Thad Smith 19 years ago

Bendix was more traditional before IBM. Check out

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Thad

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Everett M. Greene 19 years ago

It was in use with Bendix computers in the 0-9,U-Z form prior to the mid-60s. Perhaps IBM was the first to use the 0-9,A-F form?

Octal has always been a pain in the rear for use on machines with a 2**n word size.

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Ignacio G.T. 19 years ago

Coos Haak escribió:

In fact, seventy two: 6 * 12 tribes. Although the Bible is well known for its inaccuracy in numbers (such as pi = 3).

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Paul Keinanen 19 years ago

One of my colleague had 27, 28 and 29 year birthday parties and after a few years she continued with 30, 31 etc. :-).

Paul

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CBFalconer 19 years ago

I had my 39th a few months ago. But very few are using base 22. At least I got past my 0113rd.

Some informative links:

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dick 19 years ago

ancient China use hex. Abacus is a hex device.

go to Chinese medicine store, they are using hex everyday.

Chinese fortune teller is using hex everyday.

larwe wrote:

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dick 19 years ago

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toby 19 years ago

Why do you think so? This thread is discussing hexadecimal, base 16 as used in computing (for which the common contextual abbreviation is hex, not to be confused with the prefix hex meaning 6.)

This page claims the Chinese Abacus counts in base 10:

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Got any supporting details? If you mean the hexagrams of the I Ching, that appears to be related to the number 6 - as in pairs of trigrams - and is not apparently related to 16 (hexadecimal).

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dick 19 years ago

it is wrong.

please refer

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Hexadecimal system

Traditional Chinese weighing units was a hexadecimal system. One jin (=E6=96=A4) equals sixteen liang (=E5=85=A9). Abaci were commonly used in m= arket place to calculate with these hexadecimal units. When all the beads in the Chinese abacus are used, each column can be used to represent numbers between 0 to 15 (two 5s and five 1s.) Computation in decimal and hexadecimal is very similar except one extra bead from both the upper and lower deck are used.

[edit]

toby wrote:

ex

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toby 19 years ago

market

Thanks for the explanation. Were there any other units in the system?

ers

hex

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Tom Lucas 19 years ago

No the pi one is true, but only for very small values of pi ;-)

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CBFalconer 19 years ago

This is an interesting discussion, especially the Chinese usage. I have taken the trouble to edit out the confusing top-posting, in order to make it coherent.

Some informative links:

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toby 19 years ago

Explains a lot, really. AFAIK That innumeracy has made it into school curricula, thanks to the lunatic Christian fringe.

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Semi-OT: When did hexadecimal come into common use?

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