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Aside from what others said, the byte as an 8-bit entity wasn’t settled at the time.

At PDP, the PDP-5, PDO-8 and PDP-12 were 12-bits and the PDP-6 and PDP-10 were 36 bit, all of which are multiples of both 3 and 4

Memory was expensive at the time, so I would guess most of them had 6-bit character sets. That must have made octal a popular choice.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#History_of_written... shows the notation for hex wasn’t settled upon. I think that’s an indication of its rarity (go read it to learn which version was deemed “ridiculous” :-) )



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