COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 24

THE HEXADECIMAL NUMBER SYSTEM AND THE IBM 360 COMPUTERS
Several years later, IBM introduced their System 360 Computer Series, and one of their men, teaching a class on that new system, bragged that IBM had invented the hexadecimal system, and they used 0-9, and a,b,c,d,e,f. Yes, you can be sure I advised him IBM was many years too late to invent that. He was crushed to find they weren’t the first. Just to complete the thought, other than the SWAC, most but maybe not all early computers used the octal, or base 8 system, and used 0-7 as all the symbols needed for groupings of 3 binary bits. (And I still won’t tell you what that means.)

And I had to disabuse him of the idea that IBM created a lot of other things also. For example, the IBM 360 could address each and every character of memory, or groups of binary bits, as used in floating point calculations. The IBM man was disappointed to hear that the Control Data 3200 could do that also. Each machine did that in a completely different manner, which I won’t try to explain here. (Not that you wouldn’t understand the correct description, but because maybe I don’t remember exactly how each really did that.)

And just to finish that subject, at Control Data years later, there was a computer that was programmed using the quartic number system, for groupings of 2 binary bits. We counted 0,1,2,3, — 10,11,12,13, — 20, 21, 22, 23, etc., for each two binary bits, then on and on, if I do indeed remember that correctly, from 40 years ago.

IBM created great machines, and were responsible for most of the good things that happened in the early years of computers. However, they usually did not bring out a machine with the very latest idea, they had to build machines that would work, and work, and work. IBM machines were often a little behind in the state of the art, but their equipment always worked, well.