RES: [Flow-tools] Newbie doubt

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:42:00 -0300, Caio Brentano said:
> I mean Megabyte. Reading Wikipedia I concluded that 1 octet = 1 byte.
> Is it right?

Yes.  The term "octet" was used to refer to an 8-bit byte in many of the
original RFCs that defined the Internet standards, because many machines
that were on the net had *other* sized bytes.  Rather than being 16/32
bit machines, they were 18 and 36, which led to "5 7-bit bytes in a 36
bit word", "4 9-bit bytes", and the PDP10/DEC20 "variable width bytes",
where the 36-bit word could contain a 7 bit byte followed by a 9, then an
8 bit byte and a 12-bit byte.

"History became legend. Legend became myth. And much that should not have
been forgotten was lost...."

How true. ;)
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