Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95

On 6/22/25 11:49 AM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-06-22, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
 

On 6/22/25 2:14 AM, rbowman wrote:
>

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 21:24:07 -0400, c186282 wrote:
>
>

     Still wonder about the Babylonian base-60 thing ...

>
Yeah, every time I have to convert degrees/minutes/seconds into something
I can work with. The jury is still out if that can be blamed on them or
not. The French tried to metrify that and more or less failed.

>
    It WAS a really weird system for sure.
    PROBABLY based on 360 degrees, but we
    can't be sure. '
>
    Odd factoid, the old Greek scientists had
    to change their crap number system to
    Babylonian, do the calx, then convert
    back to the Greek system.
>
    Anyway, 60 different numbers ... likely twice
    as many symbols as needed to write the main lang.
    Wow.

 And then there's base-64...

   Don't see that often ...
   The Babylonian thing was PROBABLY an offshoot of
   religious philosophy. Thing is, even though awkward,
   they DID have the better approach to math. It is
   reported that the old Greek scientists often had
   to convert their bogus zero-less system to Babylonian,
   do the math, then convert back.
   Somewhere I have a little book entitled "Zero" ...
   it's about the eventual rise of the very concept
   of mathematical nothingness. Greeks HATED that,
   provided endless excuses, they had a 'philosophical
   perfection' view of things even though that almost
   NEVER exists in the Real World. Planetary motions
   were supposed to be cosmically PERFECT circles,
   for example, even though you'll never see such a
   thing except for a passing instant in reality.
   As for base-8 ... remember that CPUs came in MANY
   flavors in the bad old days ... the 4/8/16/32 thing
   hadn't become a standard yet. 18 bit CPUs and devices
   were NOT unknown in the 50s and early 60s. 12 bits
   were seen. It was a marketing plus if you could do
   two more bits than the competition.
   Ah, all the cheery red vacuum tubes  :-) But glad
   they were soon replaced by boring transistors ...
   If you're young, find a pic of what LOOK like ICs
   in the early 60s IBMs. They're actually a little
   metal box with discrete transistors/diodes/resistors
   packed inside. Actual ICs were too new to be trusted.
   Those big mainframe boxes were PACKED with those
   faux-ICs ... each one a single logic gate.