Anyone with a vague knowledge of computers has heard of binary numbers (base 2) – the famous 1s and 0s. Those of us who have programmed have used the binary system of numbers in our work. On a few occasions I have used the octal numeral system (base 8). Outside of the ubiquitous decimal system (base 10), count your fingers, the numeric system I am most familiar with is hexadecimal (base 16), sometimes referred to as hex. Before I switched over to Oracle systems, I spent a large portion of my programming career working with mainframes using COBOL, some Assembler, and rarely PL/1 programming languages (there were other languages I used, but I won’t bore you). Working in these languages on a mainframe platform it is mandatory to have an intimate knowledge of hex and hex math.
In case you are not up on your hexadecimal… the digits in this numeral system are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 9, a, b, c, d, e, f.
Now scribble in a corner of your mind with disappearing ink that I was born in 1952.
In the year 2000 I started giving my age in hexadecimal, i.e. 30. I continued to use hex numbers until 2010. Somehow or another saying I was 3a left even a more perplexed expression on peoples’ faces than when I was saying I was 30 at the start of the new century. In 2016 I was able to switch back to hexadecimal and truthfully assert that I was 40, and I can currently, with a semi-straight face, claim to be 45.
And so it goes.