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@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?