Split octal
Open-knowledge reference entry
Syllabic octal and split octal are two similar notations for 8-bit and 16-bit octal numbers, respectively, used in some historical contexts.
Syllabic octal
Syllabic octal is an 8-bit octal number representation that was used by English Electric in conjunction with their KDF9 machine in the mid-1960s.
Although the word 'byte' had been coined by the designers of the IBM 7030 Stretch for a group of eight bits, it was not yet well known, and English Electric used the word 'syllable' for what is now called a byte.
Machine code programming used an unusual form of octal, known locally as 'bastardized octal'. It represented 8 bits with three octal digits but the first digit represented only the two most-significant bits (with values 0..3), whilst the others the remaining two groups of three bits (with values 0..7) each. A more polite colloquial name was 'silly octal', derived from the official name which was syllabic octal (also known as 'slob-octal' or 'slob' notation,).
This 8-bit notation was similar to the later 16-bit split octal notation.
Split octal
Split octal is an unusual address notation used by Heathkit's PAM8 and portions of HDOS for the Heathkit H8 in the late 1970s (and sometimes up to the present). It was also used by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Following this convention, 16-bit addresses were split into two 8-bit numbers printed separately in octal, that is base 8 on 8-bit boundaries: the first memory location was "000.000" and the memory location after "000.377" was "001.000" (rather than "000.400").
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This entry incorporates text from “Split octal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.