From: schily@schily.net (Joerg Schilling)
Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 15:12:17 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <587e2641.3OkLy5V7l13RTp6G%schily@schily.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org>
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Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 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?
Note that the people wo did this, used the 18 bit machines before.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-17 14:12 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 ` [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? Warren Toomey
2017-01-16 20:25 ` 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 [this message]
2017-01-17 15:28 ` ron minnich
2017-01-16 20:45 Noel Chiappa
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