[ih] Dotted decimal notation

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 30-Dec-20 09:52, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> On 12/29/2020 12:20 PM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>> It's not so great on 8 bit bytes or 16 bit machines since
>> you have to do masking and shifting in your head at byte boundaries.
> 
> thereby, nicely distinguishing what makes for geek macho-hood.  back 
> then, at least.

On the PDP-8, the direct address was 7 bits long, so with 12-bit
instructions you had to mentally mask the octal anyway to extract
the direct address.

It annoys me a bit that I can no longer recite the PDP-8 bootstrap
loader in octal. There was no ROM, so you had to key it in every time,
which I did several times a day as a grad student.

Sorry, nothing whatever to do with Internet history.

   Brian