> Mr. Parry believes that the metric system will prove to be outdated - there > are better systems. He says that advanced computers use a 16 base system; > the computers that control guided missiles cannot do decimal calculations; > decimal calculations are too slow! Mr. Robert Parry is doing a first class > job. He should be given support.
I have not programmed guided missiles, but I have programmed barcode readers and battery chargers. The battery charger uses an idiosyncratic unit equal to a seventeenth of a volt. It uses an 8-bit ADC (0-255) to digitize a range of 0 to 15 V. The barcode reader uses a time unit of 1/1152000 s, or something like that, to measure bar widths. The timer overflows in 65536 of these units. Its clock rate, IIRR, was chosen to be a multiple of 9600 Hz so that it can talk in common baud rates. These idiosyncratic units have nothing to do with an all-purpose measuring system with a consistent numeric base, except for being defined in terms of it. As to the base of such a system, it could have been 16, 20, 60, or 10, as long as most humans know how to calculate in that base. Base 20 was used in what are now northern Spain, France, England, and Guatemala, and base 60 was used in Babylonia. Base 10 has won out, and that is what the metric system is based on. There is no other general-purpose measuring system with a different base; other sets of units have numeric mishmashes. Pierre
