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.