Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:27:13 -0700
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:40:53 -0400
c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:

> >> Anyway, 60 different numbers ... likely twice as many symbols as
> >> needed to write the main lang. Wow.
> > 
> > And then there's base-64...
> 
> Don't see that often ...
> 
> The Babylonian thing was PROBABLY an offshoot of religious philosophy.

Wikipedia has a quick rundown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Babylonian_mathematics

Not 60 distinct digits (ye gods, just imagine that,) but kind of a
tally-mark system to form composite signs for the values 0-59, and
place-value usage of these. (Still probably takes some getting used
to...!)

There were probably religious factors (the Babylonian pantheon, IIRC,
has 60 gods or somesuch,) but it's a good question whether that's a
cause or symptom of the numeral system. Another factor might well be
that 60 is a number with a nice complement of small factors:

2 * 2 * 3 * 5

which makes it evenly divisible by:

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30

Anyone who's ever been annoyed by the tendency of decimal fractions to
end in infinite repetitions of digits/sequences should appreciate the
convenience.