From: pechter@gmail.com (William Pechter)
Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11, Unix, octal?
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 20:33:52 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <fac24b7e-4851-a393-4def-276766b0f41a@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <e2a04f116207d38776abe2fa1c4dfca2547cf2fb@webmail.yaccman.com>
And DEC used octal from the 1959 PDP1 through the VAX which was
announced on October 1977.
The PDP11 register front panel was painted to make front panel octal
programming easier - breaking out the three bit patterns.
Octal was deep in the DEC history and front panel flipping fingers.
I'll never forget 014747 (single instruction memory decrement test (move
the pc to address pc - 2...
Bill
Steve Johnson wrote:
> The mainframes of the 60's and 70's all used 6-bit characters (and
> often different encodings for the non alphanumeric characters). So the
> Unix folks, including me, had experience with octal long before Dec.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From:
> "Warren Toomey" <wkt at tuhs.org>
>
>
> Something I've been meaning to ask for a while: why Unix and octal
> on the
> PDP-11? Because of the DEC documentation?
>
>
--
Digital had it then. Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com http://xkcd.com/705/
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-17 1:33 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 [this message]
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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