4 ms·

So why was the Altair front panel grouped into octal, but the Imsai in hex? I find octal totally confusing.

• vajrabum 6y ago
  Octal arithmetic is pretty easy as compared to hex and some instruction sets have 3 or six bit opcodes and/operands. So confusing or no it's pretty much for the convenience of the programmer or operator.
• coldpie 6y ago
  It's a balance between compactness and ease of converting to binary. The switches on the front panel are in binary. It's a lot easier to convert octal to binary than hexadecimal. For example: 0o13 -> 0b1_011 versus 0xB -> 0b1011