Hexadecimal
Because binary numbers are difficult to read, a simpler way to represent the same values is sought. Translating from binary to base 10 involves a fair bit of manipulation of numbers; but it turns out that translating from base 2 to base 16 is very simple, because there is a very good shortcut.
To understand this, you must first understand base 16, which is known as hexadecimal. In base 16 there are sixteen numerals: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. The last six are arbitrary; the letters A–F were chosen because they are easy to represent on a keyboard. The columns in hexadecimal are
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 163 | 162 | 161 | 160 |
| 4096 | 256 | 16 | 1 |
To translate from hexadecimal to decimal, you can multiply. Thus, the number F8C represents: ...
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