> From: Guy Sotomayor Jr
> I think it's also telling that the IETF uses the term octet in all of
> the specifications to refer to 8-bit sized data.
Yes; at the time the TCP/IP specs were done, PDP-10's were still probably the
most numerous machines on the 'net, so we were careful to use 'octet'.
Although the writing was clearly on the wall, which is why it's all in octets,
with no support for other-length words (unlike the ARPANET, which sort of
supported word lengths which were not a multiple of 8 or 16 - which was
actually use to transfer binary data between 36-bit machines).
> It *may* have been the IBM 360 that started the trend of Byte =
> 8-bits
Yup.
And then the PDP-11 put the nail in that coffin (and in 1980, there were more
PDP-11's, world-wide, than any other kind of computer).
Noel
