It seems to me we've been over this ground before. Perhaps you could explain how 20 bits would not be binary.
The IBM 704, 709, 7040, 7044, 7090 and 7094 all had 36-bit words -- and used binary addressing. Numeric information was binary. Alphanumeric information was stored as six 6-bit values per word. The IBM 705, 1401, 1410, 7010 and 7080 were all character-oriented, with 8 bits per character (6-bit BCD [binary-coded decimal] value, plus word mark bit and parity bit) and used decimal addressing (as did the word-oriented IBM 650, 7070, 7072 and 7074 -- each of which had 10 decimal digits plus sign per word, with the digits encoded using 7 bits each). As long as a bit has only two possible values (0 and 1), the system is binary, regardless of how many bits make up the next level. The memory-addressing scheme of the above character-oriented machines was wasteful, as not every possible value could be used. In any case, the higher-level programming languages (practically the only kind in use today) insulate the programmer from the machine architecture. End users are, of course, totally insulated from it. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Ma Be Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2002 00:17 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:17256] Re: Duodecimal System On Sat, 5 Jan 2002 18:02:52 M R wrote: ... >The guy who maintains this website should be >anti-metric. If you go little above in the webpage, >he argues that computers have defied metric system. > >Madan >... Actually the above is a cheap excuse. Unfortunately the problem here is that these guys decided to build computers using a binary number of bits, i.e. 4 bits, 8 bits, 16 bits, 32 bits, etc (AARRGHH!!). Had they been more user-friendly to the decimal system and they would have created 10-bit, 20-bit, 30-bit, etc computers, alas! IMHO there is no reasonable justification to use binary powers for bit buses. What can I say?... :-S Marcus Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com \\
