Don Truex has a BSEE from Tennessee Tech University and currently works for Cybernational Inc., a contract engineering firm, where his primary responsibilities are designing embedded micro-based instrumentation and automatic test equipment. He spends his off hours building a 2/3 scale replica of a Curtis Jenny. If you would like to ask Don a question or simply give comment, click here.

Positional Number Systems We were introduced to positional number systems a long time ago, it's just that most of us were not aware of it at the time. We learned the ten digits, 0 through 9, and also noted that whoever was in charge of these things had graciously seen fit to give us one finger per digit (although this little miracle doesn't come close to making up for that Hollywood Henderson winning the lottery thing). We also learned that we could represent numbers of infinite size simply by appending more digits to the left. Each digit assumes a value of 10 times that of its neighbor to the right, allowing us to, in theory, keep up with how much of our money our political servants have squandered. The actual value of a digit depends on its position in the number, the definition of a positional number system. We generically refer to the number of digits as the base or radix, 10 digits is base 10, 2 digits is base 2, 8 digits is base 8, and so on and so on. Since professionals are paid in proportion to the obscurity of the language used to describe their activities (which explains why doctors and lawyers still use Latin), we usually refer to base 2 as binary, base 8 as octal, and base 16 as hexadecimal or hex.   Click here to read the complete article.

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