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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

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!

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> 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!

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