It’s hard to believe today, but in the 1940s, the earliest computer technicians actually worked at the bit level. If a computer made a mistake and the technician determined it wasn’t from a burned-out ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

Linux provides commands for converting numbers from one base to another. Learn how to uses these commands and how to make the process easier with scripts and aliases. You might not be challenged very ...

In positional systems, as mentioned earlier, the number represented is multiplied by the base each time you move to the left of a position and is always divided by the base each time you move to the ...

“The present is big with the future,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once said, and he would know. The 17th-century philosopher and mathematician developed the binary number system that is still being used ...

While Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s work has influenced centuries of technological innovation, his own influences included Chinese philosophy and divination manuals recorded as early as 1000 BC. On ...

Computer Weekly\'s editor gives a personal perspective on the biggest issues in technology and IT strategy. In his 1983 book, Modern times: a history of the world from the 1920s to the year 2000, ...