byte An 8-bit quantity; also known as "octet" in
standardese.
Just a loint of paw but a byte is not always 8 bits though this is
the common assumption today. If you asked an IBMer in 1981, the answer
was 9 bits. To a Baudot type it would be five bits.
I knew someone was going to come up with this... in reply I'll post a classic
flame of this sort of thing from Markus Kuhn. Followups to... well, somewhere
else I guess.
Peter.
Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml,comp.std.internat
From: mskuhn(_at_)cip(_dot_)informatik(_dot_)uni-erlangen(_dot_)de (Markus
Kuhn)
Subject: Silly ISO terminology (was: UTF)
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 10:02:09 GMT
I know very well that UTF means
Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set Transformation Format.
Some ISO committees have a real talent for effective anti-marketing by
introducing lots of abbreviations which only support the common theory that
some ISO standards have been written by little green monsters from outer space
in order to confuse normal human beings and prepare them for the big invasion.
Who can remember 'Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set Transformation
Format' easily without checking the standard?
Why means UCS 'Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set' and not simply
much easier to remember 'Universal Character Set'? Why do we use strange
terminology like 'octet' while today every 10-year old kid learns at school
that 'byte' means 'an 8-bit binary number used in computers to store
information'. Why use many character set standards still the extremely exotic
08/15 notation for bytes (sorry, octets ;-) instead of the hexadecimal notatio
used by everyone else all over the world.
Markus
Peter.