Supprised nobody referenced this post (at least I didnt see it). Part Numbering Standards
While I do not advocate a totally random numbering system, I feel I need to point out that if you use all 26 letters, and all 10 numerical digits you are working in what can be called “base 36”… that means for each digit you get 36 values. The problem with base 36 is that you can spell naughty words (dont ask how I accidentally found this out with a 4-digit customer numbering system… oops), and so it is not really a good thing to use as a part numbering system that is exposed to the public… So… if we remove the vowels, this also removes the zero/letter-o problem… so that brings us to a base-31 system.
In a base 31 system, with 5 digits, you can acheive over 28.6 million values, which should be more than suffucient for any company instead of a 50 digit numerical value. I can probably remember 5 digits, but i cannot remember a 25 digit value.
Anyway, here is a base table that shows these counts:
| base | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 31 | 36 | 8 | 16 | ||
| Digits | 1 | 10 | 31 | 36 | 8 | 16 |
| 2 | 100 | 961 | 1,296 | 64 | 256 | |
| 3 | 1,000 | 29,791 | 46,656 | 512 | 4,096 | |
| 4 | 10,000 | 923,521 | 1,679,616 | 4,096 | 65,536 | |
| 5 | 100,000 | 28,629,151 | 60,466,176 | 32,768 | 1,048,576 | |
| 6 | 1,000,000 | 887,503,681 | 2,176,782,336 | 262,144 | 16,777,216 |