Introduction to the Hexadecimal System

The need for another number system

We have the decimal system for our everyday counting, which is conveniently base-10 because of our ten fingers. We also have the base-2 binary system because of the high and low states a transistor in a computer can have. So why would we need another number system? Let’s see with an example.

The number $900$ in binary is $1110000100$.

Because 2 is a small base, it takes a large number of digits to represent a value, and the problem here is that it is hard for humans to accurately read and write a number in binary.

So we need a method better than a string of 1’s and 0’s to represent binary numbers. Let’s try something.

$0011$ $1000$ $0100$ ...