Why “Octal” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
I spent the last few months porting the original PlayStation Metal Gear Solid (1998) decompilation directly to an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, targeting the Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sen…
by dmcrespo · Sep 29, 2026
Octal on a PDP-11 meant that the instruction set (16 bits) allowed two-register instructions with src/dst register and modes taking up 12 bits. So you programmed the front…
by rswail · Sep 29, 2026
The first machine I ever played with was a PDP-11/10 with 16K of "core" and 3 ASR-33s & a VT52 connected by 20mA current loop serial. Bootstrap was a small set of octal ins…
by rswail · Sep 29, 2026
Octal allowed used of simpler numeric displays (numeric nixie tubes or 7-segment displays) as you only needed digits and not ABCDEF that you'd need for hex notation.
by SoftTalker · Sep 28, 2026
Octal sockets are just tube sockets with 8 pins, it doesn't mean they calculate in octal
by voidUpdate · Sep 28, 2026
I have restored a Data General MicroNOVA that also uses octal. It has an emulated front panel over serial and uses octal in multi-digit commands like specifying which address yo…
by AkBKukU · Sep 28, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "octal" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "octal" over time.
Octal is a numeral system for representing a numeric value as base 8. Generally, an octal digit is represented as "0" to "7" with the same value as for decimal but with each place a power of 8. For example: Read more on Wikipedia