From: rminnich@gmail.com (ron minnich)
Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 22:31:16 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP6exYJfDieP0wPwSnPq-DJpEaJZfwbrAvOqyjnwUhKnnZ09pA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <868tqau503.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org>
octal was also a good fit for a lot of the other dec systems of the time,
notably the 8 and the 10. I actually found octal to be a pain in the neck
on the -11: values and addresses were 377, or 177777 and 377777 and ...
bleah. I was glad when hex came along.
On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 1:04 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
> Warren Toomey wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Octal is a natural fit for the instruction set encoding.
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-16 22:31 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 [this message]
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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