From: wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 06:15:43 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <a197c48bff02cb5a7a9f1323ae67c488a35a045f@webmail.yaccman.com>
On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 11:10:37AM -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
> We would pore over the crash dumps (in hex, then a
> new thing for us -- PDP-11 was all octal, all the time).
Something I've been meaning to ask for a while: why Unix and octal on the
PDP-11? Because of the DEC documentation?
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?
Cheers, Warren
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-16 20:15 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-01-16 19:10 [TUHS] Article on 'not meant to understand this' Steve Johnson
2017-01-16 20:15 ` Warren Toomey [this message]
2017-01-16 20:25 ` [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? Lars Brinkhoff
2017-01-16 22:31 ` ron minnich
2017-01-16 20:31 ` Erik E. Fair
2017-01-17 1:09 ` Steve Johnson
2017-01-17 1:33 ` William Pechter
2017-01-17 14:28 ` Joerg Schilling
2017-01-17 15:14 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
2017-01-17 16:53 ` William Cheswick
2017-01-17 14:12 ` Joerg Schilling
2017-01-17 15:28 ` ron minnich
2017-01-16 20:45 Noel Chiappa
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