> _I'm appalled at you, in a way. You're all "Establishment." And I think I spent 20 years fighting the "Establishment."_ > > _In the early years of programming languages, the most frequent phrase we heard was that the only way to program a computer was in octal._ > > _Of course a few years later a few people admitted that maybe you could use assembly language._ > > _But the entire establishment was firmly convinced that the only way to write an efficient program was in octal._ > > _They totally forgot what happened to me when I joined Eckert-Mauchly._ > > _They were building BINAC, a binary computer. We programmed it in octal._ > > _Thinking I was still a mathematician, I taught myself to add, subtract, and multiply, and even divide in octal._ > > _I was really good, until the end of the month, and then my checkbook didn't balance._ > > _It stayed out of balance for three months until I got hold of my brother who's a banker._ > > _After several evenings of work he informed me that at intervals I had subtracted in octal._ > > _And I faced the major problem of living in two different worlds._ > > _That may have been one of the things that sent me to get rid of octal as far as possible._ > > -Grace Hopper goto: [[c8n|/usr/sbin/c8n]]