

That smells a little like folk etymology to me, are you sure about that? My understanding is that since the word is older than computers and can refer to any group of 8 things, “octet” in computing just came from the need to communicate a group of exactly 8 bits given that bytes aren’t always that size.



You said they’re called octets because they’re supposed to be written in octal. I was saying why I don’t think that’s true.