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.