I agree with you 100% there. The Datapoint 2200 (which the 8008 cloned) used octal for its instructions and the instruction decoding is almost trivial to unders

I agree with you 100% there. The Datapoint 2200 (which the 8008 cloned) used octal for its instructions and the instruction decoding is almost trivial to understand. Unfortunately, Intel used hexadecimal for the documentation. In hex, you can kinda see some patterns in the opcodes. The 6502, on the other hand, arranges the fields 3-3-2, so octal is no help even though the fields use bit triples. Discussion of "x86 is an octal machine": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409100