Actually I'm surprised that any school *wouldn't* teach binary-octal-hex
conversions.  Converting to base 10 can be somewhat cumbersome on paper, but
going from binary to octal or hex is a snap.  I usually use my HP-16C for that
sort of thing, but sometimes it's quicker to do it without the calculator.,

My 7th grade math class included binary to decimal conversions and binary math
in 1967, at a time when most students might have expected never to see a
computer anywhere but on TV.

Wayne




Gerry Dresch <[log in to unmask]> on 09/13/2000 12:16:37 PM

Please respond to Gerry Dresch <[log in to unmask]>

To:   [log in to unmask]
cc:    (bcc: Wayne Brown/Corporate/Altec)

Subject:  Re: [HP3000-L] communication skills (was: new look & feel forjazz)



At Wilmington College in Ohio, the Digital Logic (weed out) course still
makes the students do the conversions with paper and pencil.  It was fun
student instructing the course and seeing those kids struggle without their
calculators.  I had one kid who could program his TI-85 to do the
conversions but could not do it by hand.  Most mistakes were in addition and
subtraction, 119 + 13 = 122 instead of 132.

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Doug Becker
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2000 11:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: communication skills (was: new look & feel forjazz)


Tracy Johnson wrote:

"I was just mentioning to someone this evening how effective a torture
technique it is (and how valuable it would be to High School students) to
force feed the manual methods to convert Binary to Octal to Hexadecimal and
back again, in their basic computer course."

I remember the days the RCA Software Engineer came in with a hand held LED
calculator that would change between the different bases.
I wanted one of those *SO BAD* I could taste it--debugging EBCDIC dumps from
RCA DOS would have been wondrous.
Unfortunately, they were $600 at the time.