Re: questions about bits and bytes

Dr. Dimitri Vulis writes:

I used to hack a CDC Cyber box designed by Seymour Cray before he started his oen company. It had the following curious features:

1 word = 10 _bytes_ = 60 bits 1 _byte_ = 6 bits

. . .

I believe BESM-6 also had 6-bit bytes. I have the dox for it someplace (in Russian) but can't find them offhand.

Moral: it's not necessarily redundant to say '8-bit byte'.

Which is precisely the reason the IETF always refers to "bytes" as "octets". "Octet" is defined to be eight bits, regardless of local word sizes.