From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rminnich@gmail.com (ron minnich) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 15:28:03 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal? In-Reply-To: <587e2641.3OkLy5V7l13RTp6G%schily@schily.net> References: <20170116201543.GA16532@minnie.tuhs.org> <587e2641.3OkLy5V7l13RTp6G%schily@schily.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 6:12 AM Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > Note that the people wo did this, used the 18 bit machines before. > > > As steve johnson pointed out, just about everything around then was octal. I think IBM brought widespread use of hex with the 360 ca. 1964, but to most other vendors octal was a way of thinking as your interesting quote points out. As for character formats, on e.g. the pdp-10 you had lots of choice, including 6 6-bit chars or 7 5-bit chars with one bit left over as common ... I also recall people used to complain about the inefficiencies inherent in 8-bit character formats ... I for one was still pretty glad to see octal mostly go away. ron -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: