Bob Hall Corrects the Record...
He writes, apropos of this:
Of course you are right that I have roots in programming. However, it was on a decimal machine, the 1620, that occupied most of the basement of the Sloan building in the 1960s. The internal name of the 1620 at IBM was Cadet, which was rumored to stand for Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, because it used a table for addition rather than having addition hardware.
Thus 1023 was just a random choice. Unless...
--Bob
Charles Babbage must have been spinning in his grave...
