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From: esmith@goofy.apple.com (Eric Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Looking for a really odd computer
Message-ID: <ESMITH.90Oct11105739@goofy.apple.com>
Date: 11 Oct 90 17:57:39 GMT
References: <ESMITH.90Oct10173750@goofy.apple.com> <12916@encore.Encore.COM>
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Organization: Frobozz Magic Widget Company
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In-reply-to: jkenton@pinocchio.encore.com's message of 11 Oct 90 01:34:03 GMT

In article <12916@encore.Encore.COM> jkenton@pinocchio.encore.com (Jeff Kenton) writes:
>   From article <ESMITH.90Oct10173750@goofy.apple.com>, by esmith@goofy.apple.com (Eric Smith):
>> 
>>>   Five bits gave you radix 50 (used by the file system).
>> 
>> Sorry, five gave you radix 32.  The file system used six bits per character,
>> or radix 64.
>> --
>Radix 50 (50 is octal == 40 decimal) gave 3 characters per 16 bit word.  There
>were 39 encodable characters: A-Z, 0-9, and "$", "%", ".".  Each character
>had a value from 1 to 39 (in the order shown).  A 16 bit value was created
>by calculating 1600*<first char> + 40*<second char> + <third char>, giving
>slighly fewer than 64000 possibilities.

Yes, but the original posting said 5 bits/character = radix 50.  That is
still incorrect.  Radix 50 is actually a little less than 5+1/3 bits per
character.  I stand by my assertion that 5 bits per character is radix 32
(decimal).

Eric
--
Eric L. Smith      Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those
esmith@apple.com   of my employer, friends, family, computer, or even me!  :-)