And the instructions in octal actually made sense as well, they were laid out such you could follow an octal dump. Well, my TA for that course, Ken Witte, could. I have memories of him coming over for a beer and reading my octal core dump and pointing to the string of numbers and saying "right here is where you went wrong". Smart dude, I never got that good, I could puzzle through the dumps but it was work; he could read them like assembler.
I believe that only worked because DEC laid out the instructions, the numbers themselves, in a uniform way. Not positive but I think they used 3 octal digits and the middle one was like load or store and the leading/trailing ones modified how/what was being loaded/stored. I'd have to go look it up to be sure, but there was something like that, might be different than I said it, but it was laid out in a sensible way in the actual numbers so you could read them easier.
Really fun machine. I think the only 32 bit machine that came close was Nationals 32032 but they never seemed to be able to produce a bug free chip. Too bad, that one was pleasant too.