6 ms·
I’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I do
by philiplu 1y ago
I’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I don’t know - I never got a chance to use DEC equipment back in the 70s.
- anyfoo 1y agoSeveral PDPs used 18 bit word sizes (we standardized on 8 bit bytes and multiples for word sizes later on). 18 is not divisible by 4, but it is divisible by 3. An octal digit groups three bits together, just like a hexadecimal digit groups 4 bits together.