From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 06:15:43 +1000
Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?
In-Reply-To: <a197c48bff02cb5a7a9f1323ae67c488a35a045f@webmail.yaccman.com>
References: <a197c48bff02cb5a7a9f1323ae67c488a35a045f@webmail.yaccman.com>
Message-ID: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org>

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