27 Feb
2011
27 Feb
'11
1:12 p.m.
--On Saturday, February 26, 2011 9:04 PM +0000 Always Learning centos@g7.u22.net wrote:
Are you sure 'octets' is correct?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Octet_%28computing%29
Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember "byte" being a synonym for "bit field" and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines.
The PDP-11 and microcomputers used 8-bit bytes, and their popularity meant most people using computers at home or in small businesses assumed that that was the only size a byte could be.