2.8M 3.5" floppy (was: three and a quarter inch floppy?

[Ethan Dicks]

> At 02:18 AM 3/13/05 +0000, you wrote:
> >On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:26:45 -0800 (PST), Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
> wrote:
> >> Byte is 8 bits.
> >
> >In my networking courses at university we were always taught that 8
> >bits was called an octet,  because the size of a byte varies between
> >machines.

In the TCP/IP world, that would most likely come from the terminology
of the PDP-10 world (think back to the days of IMPs, etc.)  On the -10,
one stores 6 6-bit characters in a machine word, and one speaks of
bytes that are 6 bits.  AFAIK, 'octet' was invented in networking circles
to prevent any ambiguity about which size byte one was discussing.

Outside of PDP-10 and Cyber circles, "byte" has pretty much meant 8-bits,
though.  If one only worked on microcomputers (i.e., post 1974), the
tug-of-war was over, and byte "always meant 8 bits".

-ethan