On Sun, 6 Jan 2002 00:48:01   
 Bill Potts wrote:
>It seems to me we've been over this ground before.
>
>Perhaps you could explain how 20 bits would not be binary.
>...
???  Where did you get that from, Bill?  Did I say anything to that effect???  Please 
reread my post.  I made no argument concerning the above whatsoever. When I talked 
about binary, I talked about "binary *NUMBER* OF BITS" (in the sense that such numbers 
would be perfect multipliers of 2), nothing to do with its being a binary SYSTEM or 
not! (I'm keeping my entire post here for your reference!)
...
>As long as a bit has only two possible values (0 and 1), the system is
>binary,...

Precisely!  I can't understand where you saw disagreement in my post.  Quite the 
opposite, you've given me more amunition and reason to accept my argumentation!

I just wished that these guys would stop insisting on coming up with a next generation 
of computers always based on powers of 2 for bits.  I'd prefer that they'd start 
producing a 100-bit bus computer/memory in the future and abandon this hideous 
practice.  I'd also like them to come up with a next generation ASC-III code that 
would be based on 10 bits!  There would be more than enough there to address all 
funny, different characters in western civilization and some!

Marcus

>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...


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