From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rminnich@gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 22:31:16 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? In-Reply-To: <868tqau503.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> References: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org> <868tqau503.fsf@molnjunk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: 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 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. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: