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A byte has been synonymous with an octet for as long as I can remember. I found a Wikipedia article [1] that describes the transition of a byte meaning the number of bits to encode character of text to an octet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_information

It does depend on context though. Transports often use 8b/10b, which is why SATA 6Gb/s is also 600 MB/s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding

A byte is also referred to the smallest addressable unit. Which in most cases is 8 bits but many (I guess mostly niche architectures) have much larger characters/bytes, and is still very much relevant.

I love your comments! Always learning something new. (this time about SATA)

In C it’s not when CHAR_BIT != 8.

I just had to google "is byte always 8 bits" so see that in historical context it wasn't always the case.

But probably for all practical purposes in modern era, we can safely assume it's always 8 bits.

In the CS tests for every UK exam board, a byte is always 8 bits