Hi, Timothy M Butterworth wrote: > It takes 8 bits to make one byte, should we change that to 10 too....
We once had the other way round. Four bits making one decimal digit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal The elders even had opinions whether Gray was to prefer over plain binary encoding. David Wright wrote: > At least with CHS, you got some of the factorisation done for > you, like 14655/64/32 and 9729/255/63, and you can see they're > not based on binary powers. I understand that sectors-per-head = 255 and heads-per-cylinder = 63 was chosen to squeeze numbers as high as possible into the CHS fields of MBR partition tables which are 10, 8, and 6 bits wide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record Insofar 14655 and 9729 are not valid cylinder sizes. The numbers 255 and 63 are indeed based on powers of 2, because they are the highest ones which can be expressed unsigned by 8 and 6 bits. To our luck time has steamrolled CHS in favor of Logical Block Addresses. The software always had to ask the BIOS for the "geometry" parameters because those are not stored in the partition table. (We were all so young and infantile back then ...) Have a nice day :) Thomas
