Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!richard From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Looking for a really odd computer Message-ID: <3535@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 12 Oct 90 14:38:53 GMT References: <2383@ux.acs.umn.edu> Reply-To: richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 23 In article esmith@goofy.apple.com (Eric Smith) writes: >> 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 was a way of packing six characters into a 32-bit number. There were 40 characters (50 octal = 40), thus using 64000^2 of the 65536^2 possible 32-bit values. The characters were nul 0-9 A-Z . $ % in that order, and were encoded simply by multiply by powers of 40. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed AI Applications Institute, ARPA: R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Edinburgh University. UUCP: ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin