Why use hexadecimal values for computer ?

Let's look at the evolution of the human numbering systems : humans tried base 13, base 11, base 4, base 3, Oh man ! you name it ... until the Hindu-Arabic numbering system BASE 10 was invented. It made everything much easier, from business transactions to handling all sorts of daily interactions including numbers ... Because, we have 10 fingers :) - Tolga Soyata · University of Rochester
How about computers ? It is very clear where the BINARY numbering came from: BASE 2 is the natural representation for CPUs ... TRUE or FALSE, the most NOISE TOLERANT numbering system, which is necessary when you are working at 4GHz, and flipping billions of these BITS a second, and you do not want to mistake a 0 for 1. Any higher base system, Base 16 (i.e., hexadecimal), and BASE 256 (BYTE) is a natural expansion of BINARY by using MULTIPLE BINARY bits ...

    Your question translates to : WHY DID WE INITIALLY CHOOSE TO GROUP 4-BITS ... In other words, why not 5 bits ? 5 bits would be much better than 4 ... 2^5=32, so, a BYTE would be 1024, which is much closer to 1000 and easy to understand. Also, 10 bits is a much nicer number than 8 ?? So, why did we choose 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 bits for CPU widths ??? instead of 5, 10, 20, 40, 80 ? or something else ?

For the answer, let's go down the memory lane.A Japanese calculator company calls a, then, very good semiconductor manufacturer named INTEL in the 70's and asks them to design a specialized chip that is PROGRAMMABLE and can compute things in CHUNKS. They choose a chunk size of 4 bits, since, this is a size that is compatible with that time's technology and can perform the computations of that calculator well. INTEL designs it, but has many manufacturing issues.

They run out of time and cannot deliver the product.The Japanese calculator manufacturer cancels the order, and INTEL thinks of ways to sell that IC as a PROGRAMMABLE IC. They call it 4004. The product sells well, but, the data size is not big enough. INTEL immediately designs a version of it that can process TWICE AS MANY BITS (8 bits) at a time. 8008 was born ! This evolves to 8080, 8085, 8086 (16 bits) and we know the rest of the story.

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