16 Jan
2017
16 Jan
'17
11:31 p.m.
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 <lars(a)nocrew.org> 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.