Wikipedia has some info (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History_of_the_conflictin...):

"The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used.[4][5][6][7] The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables[a] or slab, before the term byte became common."

If you want to be specific, you could say "octet" to describe a set of 8 bits.

AFAIK, before everything was byte-addressable and this became standard, people used to talk about "word" sizes. Some computers would have 36 or 38-bit words. The CDC 6000 had 60-bit words, where that was the smallest size value you could address in memory. For things like characters, you would have to pack multiple chars per word. The Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine had 36-bit words, and it used some of those bits to tag different data types so every value in memory had some basic type information attached to it.

By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...)

I was curious and searched HN and found this 2012 comment explaining octet is essentially an anachronism, as bytes have been standardized at 8 bits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649528 . Feeling old!

> By the way, the handy word for an 8-bit byte is “octet” (I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school. Don’t use it at work or you might come across as an ass...)

I see it used (and use it myself) from time to time in contexts where you want to differentiate between 7/8/9-bit bytes, mostly when working with embedded/low-level software.

The place I see it most is in networking RFCs.

Beat me to it. "Octet" is used in a lot of networking documentation, and it also nicely decouples wire formats from any meaning the host system might have for the information. From IP's point of view, an octet is literally that: a bag of 8 bits, without meaning. It's not part of a floating point number, or a UTF character, or anything else but just plain undifferentiated data.

Thanks. My application layer bias is showing. We will always need octet in the low-level networking domain, huh.

> I have not observed octet used in the software industry, only in school.

Commonly, the word octet is used to refer to IP addresses, and the permission octets of files in nix systems.

application/octet-stream

Octet is the word used for bytes in French. Data sizes in French locale are expressed most often in ko, Mo, Go, To ...

I remember my Commodore 64's book (in Spanish) mentioned octets. This brings back memories!

A nibble is half a byte or 4 bits.

That’s “nybble”: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/nybble.html

Quote:

    > nybble: /nib´l/, nibble, n.
                        ^---- see that word over here?

I hereby declare 256bytes a whopper, and 512bytes a doublewhopper

1024 bytes is a vomit, 4096 is a heart-attack.

SHA-whopper

Nibble and nybble are alternate spellings.

> I thought a byte ment “by eight”

There are differing sizes for bytes. This isn't so common, anymore, but that was the point being made.

> What’s a nibble of a byte is 8bits

A nibble is 4 bits not 8 bits.