[TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?

[ron minnich]

octal was also a good fit for a lot of the other dec systems of the time,
notably the 8 and the 10. I actually found octal to be a pain in the neck
on the -11: values and addresses were 377, or 177777 and 377777 and ...
bleah. I was glad when hex came along.



On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 1:04 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:

> Warren Toomey wrote:
> > I understand why other DEC architectures (e.g. PDP-7) were octal: 18b
> > is a multiple of 3. But PDP-11 is 16b, multiple of 4.  After all, Unix
> > had its own assembler, so was there a need/reason to use octal?
>
> Octal is a natural fit for the instruction set encoding.
>
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