
Originally Posted by
Nevyn
yay, but what do you mean number basis?
A quick re-count and I'm wrong his age would not be 40 in the case I was thinking of,
Number base - you are used to counting in tens. ie 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Your computer works in '2's - the digits being 0 and 1
THe base is if you like 'the count of different digits in the system'
we use only 10 numbers to count that is 0-9 after that we recycle them.
Base of 5 (quinary i think)
is
0,1,2,3,4
then 10,11,12,13,14
20,21,22,23,24
etc to 44 then 100.
You may also hav seen 'hex' short for 'hexadecimal' - six-ten or sixteen
that's the one we love but there are only 10 digits! we need another 6!
lets go and use the first six letters of the alphabet (A-F)
Now we have 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f
then 10,11,12 .... 19,1a.... 1F,20 etc up to ?? FF of course
NOw you've seen those on your PC - its a convenient way to group those 1's and 0's - four each to a hexadecimal character
1C = 0000 1100 - 8
binary digi
ts (or bits) = 1 byte!