The Cellar - Computer History

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Computer History

Today I was plundering around 1 of the book cases and found "The complete microcomputer systems handbook" by Edward L. Safford.
Anyway, when I opened, this page stood out.
"However, you must be aware of a concept in the hexidecimal system. We use the numbers 0-9 and the letters A though F and this totals 16. We also need to say right here as of this writing it is becoming more evident that the compute manufacturers will be moving into the 32 bit languages- if we may call them that-in the future computers of the 80's." And yes my spell check tells me that hexidecimal is wrong. Hey I got this from the book! :lol2:

Quote:

Originally Posted by busterb (Post 448387)

"However, you must be aware of a concept in the hexidecimal system. We use the numbers 0-9 and the letters A though F and this totals 16. We also need to say right here as of this writing it is becoming more evident that the compute manufacturers will be moving into the 32 bit languages- if we may call them that-in the future computers of the 80's."

Appreciate the context of that writing. Back then, we programmed in octal. For example, a program that everyone memorized to boot an HP minicomputer required entering 26 octal numbers; last number was the instruction 102077.

Today, a programmer would call that same number 0000843Fh.
Assembler programmers would call that HALT.
C++ programmers would write, "I don't need to know that shit".

Also notice that as computer languages get more complex, each line of code gets longer and more complex.