[TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?

[ron minnich]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 6:12 AM Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net> wrote:

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> Note that the people wo did this, used the 18 bit machines before.
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As steve johnson pointed out, just about everything around then was octal.
I think IBM brought widespread use of hex with the 360 ca. 1964, but to
most other vendors octal was a way of thinking as your interesting quote
points out.

As for character formats, on e.g. the pdp-10 you had lots of choice,
including 6 6-bit chars or 7 5-bit chars with one bit left over as common
... I also recall people used to complain about the inefficiencies inherent
in 8-bit character formats ...

I for one was still pretty glad to see octal mostly go away.

ron
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