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From: anthk <anthk@openbsd.home>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: On Binary Digits
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 06:24:44 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2025-04-04, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On 02 Apr 2025 16:45:38 GMT, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
>> Octal was used heavily on the PDP-11, if you used the assembler.
>
> All DEC’s systems used octal heavily, prior to the VAX. That’s when they 
> started using hex.
>
> All the DEC machines prior to the PDP-11 had word lengths that were 
> multiples of 3 (12, 18, 36), so octal worked nicely. Even though the 
> PDP-11 was a 16-bit machine, fields in its instruction format were still 
> designed to line up with octal digits.

Why? "octal" means base eight ( as 'ocho' in Spanish, same Latin root).

forth>3 8 lcm .

24

Not very fitting for a 36 bit machine except for opcodes.