Steve Gray wrote:

1. When I entered computers, octal and binary were the only other bases, as I recall. No one in the early days seemed to need anything else.

... the infamous SMSG ``New Math'', which i encountered in junior high school in pasadena in the 1960-1 school year, frequently used base 7, just because it was unfamiliar to everyone (i loved it) - but i never met anyone else who needed it (and very few who even wanted it 8-)) i think there was a machine that used T, E, ... for hex digits, but i can't remember, since i didn't use that machine (i only heard about it) one of the nice things in the (few) Russian math papers i've read is the use of certain Roman letters for variable names, so they do not need even to be italicized (they are easy to distinguish from the Cyrillic) more later, cal Chris Landauer Aerospace Integration Science Center The Aerospace Corporation cal@aero.org