Number conversation.. ¿¿

When we write numbers, we have ten different digits that we can put in each place (0-9). After that we need to add a new column of digits and we keep going. This is called the decimal system (or base 10). What would happen if instead of using ten digits we used eight, or two, or even sixteen? Well, what happens is instead of a decimal system we would have what's called binary, octal, or hexadecimal systems (base 2, base 8, and base 16). We use subscripts to denote the system we are using: 987610 is decimal (if we don't use a subscript we assume we are using decimal), 76538 is octal, 10102 is binary, and BEEF16 isyummy hexadecimal.

Binary – binary just has 1s and 0s. But much of our world is binary. Light switches are either up or down, your computer is either on or off, our servers are either currently up or down (hopefully up). Because computers are made up of billions of little switches (called transistors), they do calculations in binary. Everything in your computer is either on or off. And so we represent larger numbers in 1s and 0s. Each 1 or 0 is called a bit, and 8 bits is a byte.

Octal – at some point we end up with a lot of 1s and 0s and they are kind of hard to read. For example "010101000110100001100101" and that’s just to spell "The.”  But if we break that into 3 piece sections with 8 possible digits it becomes 250641458 which is a little easier to read. And thus we have octal.  Unfortunately for octal we rarely use it.

Hexadecimal – What happens if we break that down into 4 piece sections? Well, first of all we run out of digits because now we have 16 possible digits instead of our normal 10. Sothe powers that be just decided to start using letters so hexadecimal has 16 digits (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F). In other words if we wanted to write 1010 we would write A16etc.  Now if we want to write out the word "the" it looks like 54686516 which is a whole lot easier to read.

Decimal Value	Hex Value	Binary Value
0	0x00	0000
1	0x01	0001
2	0x02	0010
3	0x03	0011
4	0x04	0100
5	0x05	0101
6	0x06	0110
7	0x07	0111
8	0x08	1000
9	0x09	1001
10	0x0A	1010
11	0x0B	1011
12	0x0C	1100
13	0x0D	1101
14	0x0E	1110
15	0x0F	1111

Conversion – In decimal, the least significant digit (the one on the right) keeps track of 100. The next column is 101, then 102 etc.

So 382 is
(2 x 100)+ (8 x 101) + (3 x 102) = 2 + 80 + 300.

The same is true for other systems.

For example, 1011111102 goes thusly:
(0 x 20) + (1 x 21) + (1 x 22) + (1 x 23) + (1 x 24) + (1 x 25) + (1 x 26) + (0 x 27) + (1 x 28) =
0 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 0 + 256 = 38210

Now you try (highlight for answers):

BEED16

D x 160 = 13 x 1 = 13
E x 161 = 14 x 16 =224
E x 162 = 14 x 256 =3584
B x 163 = 11 x 4096 =45056

Add that up and you get: 4887710

And remember just because things have bytes does NOT mean you should bite them. None of our products should be ingested or inserted under the skin.