Incidentally, when I say " I toggled the PDP-8 boot loader in by hand (in octal)", the switches were of course individual binary digits.
I memorized the loader in octal, and my fingers soon learned the binary: 5 was up-down-up and 1 was down-down-up and so on (followed by deposit-next, of course)...
I still have dreams about that period of computing in my life (early 70's). It shaped the rest of my life.
I wish I'd known Seymour Cray. Must have been a helluva guy.
Ah, the PDP-8. How lovely. I became completely enchanted with the PDP-11 when it came out. It had an octal face as well. I had to key in a boot loader to load a paper tape, which in turn booted the disk-based OS.
The Motorola 68000 family was very much like a PDP-11 with twice as many registers, and 32 bit ones at that.
I cut my teeth on an IBM 1130.