3 ms·
Octal was actually a lot more common back then, people hadn't settled on hex as the default power-of-two base - just as they hadn't settled on power of 2 word s
by Taniwha 6y ago
Octal was actually a lot more common back then, people hadn't settled on hex as the default power-of-two base - just as they hadn't settled on power of 2 word sizes - pdp8 was 12-bit, pdp-6/dec-10/20 were 36 bit, the old B6700 I grew up with had 48/51-bit words - 6-bit bytes were not uncommon
- pmiller2 6y agoOctal works a little better than hex when you actually have to toggle in a boot loader at the front panel, IMO. I think 8 switches are a little easier to manage than 16 for this use case.
- Taniwha 6y agoused to know the pdp11-05 bootstrap by heart .... I'm not sure it matters - I can imagine that 2 lots of 2x4 can be done with 2 hands in 2 operations would probably be faster ... but it's kind of moot because the front panel was marked in octal so that's the way one learned it I think that standardising on 8-bit bytes and power of 2 words is what pushed us to hex as a standard notation