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Hexadecimal Tutorial

It's best if you read the page on binary first.

Humans use the decimal digits zero to nine because they have ten fingers.

Penguins are limited to using binary zeros and ones because they have only two flippers.

Well Martians have 16 fingers, so they have sixteen digits, which they call kpxvz to zxkyt, where kpxvz is the same as our zero. Their maths system is called hexadecimal, (hex for short).

When we translate Martian to Human we can use 0 to 9 for the first ten Martian fingers because they they are the same.

Humans haven't any words for the Martian numbers for the remaining six fingers, oggfv to zxkyt.

The best we can do is to use the letters A B C D E F where A is equivalent to oggfv and F represents zxkyt.

So translating Martian (hexadecimal) we use the following (binary equivalents are included).

 
decimal  hex binary
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
B
C
D
E
F
0000
0001
0010
0011
0100
0101
0110
0111
1000
1001
1010
1011
1100
1101
1110
1111

So 000F hex is the same as decimal 15.

0010 hex is the same as decimal 16.

0100 hex is the same as decimal 256.

1000 hex is the same as decimal 4096.

1111 hex = 4096+256+16+1=?
00FF=255
FFFF=65535

Prove it.


In some computers, information is stored as 16 bit binary numbers.

Imagine typing in hundreds of these numbers without making a mistake.

1111011111001101

We can make life somewhat easier by breaking this into four sections.

1111    0111    1100   1101

and converting into the hex equivalent.

F        7            C        D

or  F7CD.  Easier to type!

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