Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!ns!ddb
From: ddb@ns.network.com (David Dyer-Bennet)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Decimal Arithmetic
Message-ID: <1990Mar20.184849.18037@ns.network.com>
Date: 20 Mar 90 18:48:49 GMT
References: <27696@cup.portal.com> <76700180@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@ns.network.com (David Dyer-Bennet)
Reply-To: ddb@ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet)
Organization: Terrabit Software
Lines: 17

In article <76700180@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
:Can anyone think of other human costs of binary numbers?

Bit ordering wars and confusion.  Although the same problems could
occur in decimal, the symptoms would be more easily recognizable, so
the confusion caused would still be less.

My first two computers WERE decimal oriented -- the IBM 1620 and then
the 1401.  I didn't make the big jump to binary until I got access to
a PDP 8 several years later.


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