[e2e] OT: a different number base
Stephen Wolff
swolff at cisco.com
Wed Apr 2 06:33:31 PST 2003
The IBM 650 was a base-10 machine, but the notation/representation was
biquinary - i.e., "which hand? which finger?" as it were...
see for example <http://www.msoe.edu/~kocourek/Codes.PDF> -s
On Wednesday, Apr 2, 2003, at 08:16 US/Eastern, David P. Reed wrote:
> Of course there is Babbage, who used precisely machined wheels that
> worked in base 10. I have a lovely (non electric, hand-cranked) WWII
> Monroe calculator used in hydrodynamic calculations during the war -
> it is base 10, also.
>
> The floating point units of System 360 worked using base 16 digits (at
> one abstraction level). I suspect this is not what you mean.
>
> I believe the MIX computer in Knuth's books used base 10 logic, but
> I'm too lazy to check.
>
> Personally, I've always thought that the optimal digital system would
> be use the number base negative 13
>
>
>
> At 12:46 PM 4/2/2003 +0530, Alok Dube wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> can anyone pass me links onto digital systems working on different
>> number
>> bases..like lets say hex instead of binary..
>> Im looking for an implementation where we can find systems with number
>> bases like 4, 16 etc.... where each device is charecterised by 4 or 16
>> states etc..
>>
>> are there any working models of the same?
>>
>> or is there any literature one can lookup for the same?
>>
>>
>> -rgds
>> Alok
>
>
>
stephen wolff 202.362.7110 (v)
academic research and technology initiatives 202.362.7224 (f)
cisco systems 202.427.6752 (m)
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