The Flintstones and Jetsons hour!

One lazy Sunday morning I woke up with a small magazine (nothing to do with guns) next to my pillow. Perhaps my father had been reading it the previous day while sleeping here.
The magazine features real life stories with morals and such stuff. Often it features some anecdotes written by religious men, freedom fighters, etc. (Daddy likes the magazine for its rustic olden days feel. He says its stories are the kind his father used to tell him and his siblings)

Being still lazy and half sleeping, I opened the magazine at a random page. I did not even bother to start the story/anecdote from the beginning. It was some story about how the author had promised somebody to be at some place in case some particular event happened. And perhaps teh event actually happened, and now it was an obligation on the author's part tp be there. Actually I have absulutely no idea why he needed to be there, cos I had not read it from the beginning. But then thats part of the fun. (Read: Lazy fellow justifying laziness).

But the author was in a dilemma. He described some bus routes he took. In the last lap of his journey, his pittstop was some charitable organisation or something (Forgot) where he used to work in those days. The bus fare from that place to his destination was 3 paisa (The 'so cheap' days). But he was totally broke. So he kept walking to and fro in front of his place of work wondering if he should ask the chief lady over there for 3 paisa. He knew she would not refuse, but did not like to ask.

Suddenly he heard the postmen go inside the building and ask for his name. He went in there and presented himself. Turned out it was a money order for him. Rs 3!

So the author says (No the story continues, this is not THE MORAL of this story) that his belief that God is great got so reinforced by this. All he needed was 3 Paisa, and God sent him 64 times that amount!

On reading this I was wide awake. I couldn't care less how the story continued and what the moral was supposed to be. Usually this magazine has quite a number of typos because they have to run it at low operational costs as not many buy it. But what I just read seemed to be something totally diffeernt from typo, and too freaky in a way that I will soon tell you ( If you arent the smarty-types who have guesed it by now)

I told father, "Dad has your old magazine suddenly become ultra modern?"
Father,"Why?"
"Heck they have written things in Hexadecimal numbering system*!"
"????"
"Look at this. (Showed him that sentence) 3 Rs is obviously 100 times 3 Paisa. But instead of writing in decimal, they wrote in Hexadecimal. In Hexadecimal we write 100 (of decimal) as

100 (decimal) = 96 (decimal) + 4 = 6 x 16 + 4 = 60 (Hexadecimal) + 4 (Hexadecimal) = 64!!!!

And thats exaclty what they wrote 3 Rs is 64 times 3 paisa they have written!


And then dad solved the mystery. In those days, in the old currency system,

1 Re = 16 Anna
1 Anna = 4 Paisa
1 Paisa = 3 Pai

So 1 Re = 16 X 4 Paisa = 64 Paisa
So 3 Rs = 64 X 3 paisa!

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Strange is the world
In olden days,
1 Re = 64 paisa.
In modern days,
1 Re = 100 paisa.
But in modern days, 100 (dec) = 64 (hex)
So,
1 Re = 64 paisa.

The more things change, the more they remain the same! (well not really ;))
But being the naive cartoon network watching types (at least until few years ago), all that the above conclusion makes me think of is "The Flintstones and Jetsons hour"