On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Dave Close <[email protected]> wrote:
> Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote: > > >I'll add that "octet" is itself something of a leftover from when the > 36-bit > >dinosaurs walked the earth. > > That doesn't seem right to me. Certainly 36-bit machines (and 12-bit and > 18-bit ones) frequently divided instruction words into 3-bit units and > used octal notation to represent them. But 36%8 != 0. > "Octet" doesn't have anything to do with octal (base-8 notation). It was used instead of the word "byte", I believe, to make it crystal clear that you were talking about 8 bits; "byte" could be somewhat ambiguous (subject to interpretation as 9 bits on a 36-bit machine, for example). -Brent -- Brent Chapman <[email protected]> Netomata, Inc. -- www.netomata.com Making networks more cost-effective, reliable, and flexible by automating network configuration
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