--On Saturday, February 26, 2011 9:04 PM +0000 Always Learning
<centos@xxxxxxxxxx> 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.
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