> In fact, it's not even useful to say it's a "64-bit system" just because it has some 64-bit registers.

Usually the size of general purpose registers is what defines the bitness of a CPU, not anything else (how much memory it can address, data bus width, etc).

For instance, the 80386SX was considered a 32-bit CPU because its primary register set is 32-bit, despite the fact it had a 24-bit external address bus and a 16-bit external data bus (32-bit requests are split into two 16-bit requests, this was done to allow the chip to be used on cheaper motherboards such as those initially designed with the 80286 in mind).

Note that this is for general purpose registers only: a chip may have 80-bit floating point registers in its FPU parts (supporting floating point with a 64-bit mantissa) but that doesn't make it an 80-bit chip. That was a bit more obvious when FPUs where external add-ons like the 8087 (the co-pro for the 16-bit 8086 family back in the day, which like current FPUs read & wrote IEEE754 standard 32- & 64- bit format floats and computed/held intermediate results in an extended 80-bit format).

But in the n64’s case the GPU _could_ use the extra bit, so it’s fine. It was more trivia than anything about what the cpu could see.

But why wasn't the handcounting inherited too?

It sounds useful to be able to count up until 60 on two hands.

I believe the 360 degrees is attributed to Babylonians, who were using the Sumerian base 60 number system (6*60=360)

> "(like you just need to remember 2 more digits)"

"The standard among mathematicians for writing larger bases is to extend the Arabic numerals using the Latin alphabet, so ten is written with the letter A and eleven is written with the letter B. But actually doing it that way makes ten and eleven look like they're too separate from the rest of the digits so you can use an inverted two for ten and an inverted three for eleven. But those don't display in most fonts so you can approximate them with the letters T and E which also happen to be the first letters of the English words ten and eleven. But actually as long as we're okay for using the Latin alphabet characters for these digits then we might as well use X for ten like in Roman numerals. But actually now we're back to having them look too different from the other ten digits so how about instead we use the Greek letters Chi and Epsilon but actually if we're using Greek letters then there's no association between the X looking letter and the number ten, so maybe you can write ten with the Greek letter delta instead.

And all you really need to learn is those 'two new digits' and you're ready to use dozenal."

- Jan Misali in his comedy video on why base 6 is a better way to count than base 12 or base 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qID2B4MK7Y0 (which is a pisstake and ends up making the point that Base 10 isn't so bad).

("in dozenal, a seventh is written as 0.186X35 recurring because it's equal to one gross eight dozen ten great gross ten gross three dozen five eleven gross eleven dozen eleven great gross eleven dozen eleventh's").

Ideally you learn with what you are both with. It’s easy to have base 10 as you have ten fingers. If we only had 8 fingers we could have ended up with octal

Yeah, metric is cool and all, you can divide by ten and multiply by ten. But even better would be a hexadecimal system so that you could halve, third and quarter it. Plus it's n^2 so it's a perfect square \s

Or 5280 feet in a mile.

Maybe because 360 is already divisible by 6, so 720 is not much of an upgrade over 5!. 7! On the other hand adds another prime factor to it.

360 is base 60. (6*60)

Like minutes and seconds.

The 12 hours in a day and the 12 months are also 60 / 5.

This all connects to ancient Mesopotamia somehow.

It wasn’t designed with British miles in mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_...

I don’t think any common conversions fall near there other than miles->km. It’s certainly not the case that the systems were designed to have the golden ratio as conversions between the two.

1 mile = 1,000 [double] paces of 0.8m each = 1,600m

1m = 1e-10 times half-meridian from the North Pole to the equator, via Paris for a croissant, apparently.

So kind of a coincindence... But a very neat one. Meanwhile, ratio of adjacent Fibonacci numbers converves to some expression involving sqrt(5) which is approx 1.6

but we have green belts now!

Why not 10? 1 byte ~= 1k values. Nice easy conversions.

Personally I think 12/48/96 would be more practical than the current 8/32/64. 32 bits is almost trivially easy to overflow whereas 48 bits is almost always enough when working with integers. And 64 bits is often insufficient or at least uncomfortably tight when packing bits together. Whereas by the time you've blown past 96 you should really just bust out the arrays and eat any overhead. Similarly I feel that 24 bits is also likely to be more practical than 16 bits in most cases.

Yup, M2 had 81-bit instructions, M1 had 72-bit ones

There was a very good reasons for it, indigenous designs were obsolete by the time they left the drawing boards and countless design bureaus cost stupid amounts of money while producing dozens of incompatible computers. By the time they decided to adopt ES EVM they lagged by some 5 years and continued to lag further behind.

Setun apparently used two bits to represent a ternary value, wasting the 4th state.

Paula Bean? Mr Bean photoshopped?

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/476277134...

But, but, what about Strange?

True, False and file not found

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

hi-z is one choice. Though I don't know how well that does past a certain speed.

On, off, and ooh shiny!

null :)