Computer question

[Debbie]

quote:
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Originally posted by Guru
...But, since Intel owns the whole world, that matters little any more.
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Quote by lukkyknight

"Not true, debbiexxx owns the world!"



no, no no I say again. I may rock my world. lol just kidding.
But the world belongs to no onoe, it is precious. A loan not a gift that we all should treasure and try and make it a better place.

 

[Unclebill]

A couple more little tidbits:

BIT - essentially, an acronym from the words BInary digiT.

Hex and octal came into fairly common use for those who dealt with machine code. Either system translates directly digit for digit to/from binary. The process to translate decimal to/from binary is more complex because each digit position cannot be translated directly since each digit position in decimal is not an integral power of 2.

But for octal and hexadecimal, each digit position in any number is an integral power of 2. Thus, to translate a binary number to octal or hex, you start at the radix point position of the number and group the bits in sets of 3 (or 4) moving away from the radix point. Once the bits are so grouped, translate each group of 3 or 4 bits to the equivalent octal or hex number.

Translation in the other direction is merely the process of translating each octal or hex digit into 3 or 4 bits.

The following example hopefully illustrates the above:

Consider the digits 245 are to be converted into binary.

If the original number is decimal, the binary result is: 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1

If the original number is octal, the binary result is: 010 100 101

If the original number is hexidecimal, the binary result is: 0010 0100 0101

Note the similarity between the octal and hex results.