The interesting thing is the original source of the octal format. The 8008 had octal-structured instructions because that's what the Datapoint 2200 had, and the

The interesting thing is the original source of the octal format. The 8008 had octal-structured instructions because that's what the Datapoint 2200 had, and the 8008 took its instruction set. The Datapoint 2200 used octal because it was built out of TTL chips and used 7442 decimal decoder chips for instruction decoding (which could fully decode 3 bits).