From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: schily@schily.net (Joerg Schilling) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 15:12:17 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? In-Reply-To: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <587e2641.3OkLy5V7l13RTp6G%schily@schily.net> Warren Toomey 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/