Saturday, June 7, 2008 6:35:12 PM
this is from the sixties, when the way addition was taught was being changed. This is all much easier than he makes it seem, and octal (base 8) is not taught in elementary school or middle school, and is usually avoided in high school, unless you're doing computer programming, and even then it is rarely used (at least in America).
Wednesday, October 3, 2007 6:40:08 AM
Now instead of 4 in the 8's place you got 3 `cause you added one, that is to say 8 to the 2 But you can`t take 7 from 3 so you look in the 64`s From the 3 you then use 1 to make 8 1`s And you add those 1`s to the 3 and you get 1-3 base 8 or in other words in base 10 you have 11 and you take away 7 and 7 from 11 is 4!
Tuesday, October 2, 2007 11:01:55 PM
Base 8 was big in computer programming. Time was, everything had to be programmed in binary (base 2) to write the simple number 9 in binary you have to write 1001. That takes up A LOT of space. so by using base 8 you could use about 1/3 of the characters to say the same thing.
Today we use Hexidecimal (base 16) which is absolutely scary, but it saves even more space.