3 ms·
Today, we all agree that "byte" means 8 bits. But half a century ago, this was not so clear and the different hardware manufacturers were battling it out with d
by nayuki 1y ago
Today, we all agree that "byte" means 8 bits. But half a century ago, this was not so clear and the different hardware manufacturers were battling it out with different sized bytes.
A reminder of that past history is that in Internet standards documents, the word "octet" is used to unambiguously refer to an 8-bit byte. Also, "octet" is the French word for byte, so a "gigaoctet (Go)" is a gigabyte (GB) in English.
(Now, if only we could pin down the sizes of C/C++'s char/short/int/long/long-long integer types...)
- gnabgib 1y agoAn octet is unambiguously Latin for 8 of something; instruments, players, people, bytes, spider's legs, octopus' arms, molecules (see: octane). Octad/octade was unambiguously about 8 bit bytes, but fell out of popular usage.
- Tor3 1y agoThe term "octet" is still widely used in protocol descriptions and some other fields (source: All those interface specifications I have to read through my job)