[e2e] OT: a different number base

[Cannara]

Burroughs, perhaps more, had biquinary machines too, based on a triggered
glow-discharge tube that allowed one to read the state of each biquint merely
by looking at the top of each glass tube.  The decimal display tubes, known as
Nixies, derived from the technology, though weren't storage devices
themselves.  

I believe base 12 has been favored as the best base, because it has so many
divisors.

Alex

Stephen Wolff wrote:
> 
> 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
> >
> >
> >
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