On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 2:42 PM, Dell Setzer <dset...@panix.com> wrote:
> Probably folks back then were used to octal from having worked on > minicomputers (like DG or DEC). I've forgotten that MIT's had grouped the switches in threes on their panel like the PDP-8 and PDP-10, and PDP-11. But you are right, that was the way DEC had done it for years. So I think it depending where/hpw you grew up. But you're right, it if you came from the DEC world, you probably were used to using octal from that 12 and 18 bit heritage. DEC did not really switch to hex notation until the 32 bit Vax. If your first assembly machines was System 360 is the like, you probably learned hex. Because I came up working on both DEC and IBM systems at the beginning, I sort went both ways (was schizophrenic??). When I wrote C code (like drivers) I found I always prefered hex for bit manipulations/masks in registers or results like CSRs or memory reads, but since DEC published address in octal, assigned pointers in octal - until the Vax. As for the micro's in those days, I tended to use hex exclusively in assembler and C, since that's what Intel (or Moto or MOS Tech) had defined in their architecture book. In 1975, I could not afford a MITs machine [I still have my copy of Pop 'tronics through) although one of my friends got one for his birthday that summer with a whole 256k bytes of memory [and I remember us drooling over it]. By late '77 I did manage to score a KIM-1 with 1K of ram (which I still have) -- FYI the KIM-1 it was purely hex. Clem
_______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
