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Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix (bell-labs.com)
21 points by luu on Feb 3, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



It's fun that this talks about an address as "777302". That doesn't look like an address to slightly-more-modern eyes like mine. It's probably octal, where 7 is like 0xf in hex.

So, converting it to hex gives 0x3fec2, which is 318 bytes from the top of the first 256 KB (256 * 1024 is 0x40000), and thus sounds likely as a peripheral I/O address.


Yeah, octal was the convention on PDP-11 UNIX(TM). As I recall it wasn't until the move to 32 bit computers like the 68000 and no doubt the VAX preceding it that UNIX moved to hexadecimal.




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