On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Pat Farrell wrote:
> wrote:
>> Octal is ancient, and the only time I can think of that I've ever used
>> it is with the chmod command.
>
> I resemble that remark. use of octal was common on 36 bit computers (six
> octal chars fit nicely). The PDP-10 that Kernigan and Ritchie wished for
> when they invented Unix was 36 bits, so octal was natural.
No more so than using hexdecimal! But DEC loved octal even on 16 or 32 bit
machines. I think it has more to do with not introducing letters into
"numbers" as hex does, and people maybe find handling 0-7 and converting
to/from binary easier.
> Back when I was young, I used those machines so much that I knew all the
> character codes in octal.
Ditto in Hex :-)
> Those machines were usually 30 feet long and cost a million bucks.
> They were slower than a modern 7250 that costs about $100 bucks.
....and a lot less core (RAM) and backing store (disk) :-)
Even the "mini"-computers were huge.
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