16 Jan
2017
16 Jan
'17
9:15 p.m.
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?
Cheers, Warren