This Space for Rent

Ooo-kay

The "El Torito" self-booting CD-rom spec, when talking about the format of the superblock and root directory on a el-torito CD, mentions briefly that all numbers in the spec will be in hexidecimal (the traditional 'h' suffix and 0x prefixes are apparently too difficult to read, because one's a Unixism and the other is not) and means it; Later in the document they talk about "800 byte sectors" and "20 byte directory entries", which led to intense confusion until I realized that these aren't the 800 bytes I've been looking for.

So I wonder if the people who wrote this spec grew up using base 16, or if this is just some sort of subtle copy protection scheme meant to massively confuse people who have to write programs that check a cd for bootability. Or maybe it's the revenge of mainframe programmers who miss their lovely 3270 terminals and want to make the PC world pay for their sins.