On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 09:04:59PM -0700, Dave Close 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.
The PDP-10, which ISTM Brandon enjoyed as much as I did at the time, had a more general definition of byte: any number of bits, which had to be specified at the time. When dealing with the common case of 8-bit bytes, they could be packed in 9-bit bytes with a leading zero, or in the first 32 bits of a 36-bit word, or even 9 in (2) 36-bit words. The 16-bit sub-objects that are an eight of a 128-bit IPv6 address might be called "octones" since they are one eighth of the addres, but that's abusing my Latin. Or they could be called "16-bit bytes" using the more general definition of the word from Before Microprocessors. But of the Working Group selections I best like Hexadectet. -- /*********************************************************************\ ** ** Joe Yao [email protected] - Joseph S. D. Yao ** \*********************************************************************/ _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
