Choppy has had a bit of experience translating hex and octal into binary groupings. The computer stores magnetic signals which we usually interpret as binary digits, or bits. Three taken together can be interpreted as an octal number; six made a character in the old days. We called that, incorrectly, binary coded decimal, or BCD Octal was easy in the sense that the digits are 0-7. Grab four at a time and you can interpret it as a hexadecimal digit.
I don't particularly like the word hexadecimal because it is a hybrid name, hex from Greek and decimal from Latin. Greek didn't do 16 as a simple compound word, but as a phrase, like the French twenty and one for 21. Latin liked compounds of our sort, but the word for six is sex, so sexadecimal would be proper Latin, but maybe offensive to tender spirits. You can take a grouping of any size and interpret it as binary. Problem with some computers and their operating systems is that they store integer numbers in the standard way, with usually the sign coded into the number in some complement form. These same machines often handle what they think are strings of characters in reverse order to the groups of bits regarded as numbers in each character position. Then there were machines in the bad old days that used other ways to code numbers with bits, like the bi-quinary system of the IBM 650. But eight bytes is 40 bits on a modern machine. We didn't use the word byte for octal characters, or for the 7 bit characters used by mainframes to communicate with terminals. Remember them? It was wonderful in the old days figuring out what an address in an error message meant. VAX stood for Virtual Address eXtended, or so DEC said. Choppy At 04:07 PM 6/19/02 -0500, you wrote: >It appears to be 40 bits indeed. I bet Choppy has had some experience >translating hex and octal into 4 and 3 bit binary groupings? > >Anybody remember dealing with grey-code?
