Re: The joy of octal

"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> writes:

On 11/16/24 12:24 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 23:31:26 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

    Again, not entirely sure where the end of octal was. Many of the PDPs
    used octal, and I *think* a few PIC chips. 8/16/32 kinda took over
    kinda early on however.

chmod 4755
I don't know if I'd call it octal but if you were writing an
assembler for
quite a few microcontrollers the opcodes would have a pattern where source
ans destination registers were 0 - 7,

>
>
  Octal does persist, sometimes in obscure ways and places.
  It WAS kinda big for awhile - a "big step" better than
  8-bit.
>
  Alas don't think anymore 12 or 24 bit CPUs are
  gonna be made. Might still have a place for some
  higher-end microcontrollers - hell, I think Epson
  still makes FOUR-bit microcontrollers (looked at
  the sheet for one once, insanely capable).
>
  Hmmm ... 256 of those 4-bitters running
  parallel - that'd be a fun project :-)
>

GE's "GECOS" and later Honeywell's "GCOS" mainframe machines were all
36-bit words, so octal was a natural for them: 6 6-bit BCD characters or
4 9-bit bytes per 36 bit word.

--
-Don_from_AZ-