Octets calculation?

[William Yeo]

Hail:

In article <bc95ic$gl1s5$2 at ID-169208.news.dfncis.de>,
 "Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de)" <g2h5dqi002 at sneakemail.com> 
 wrote:

> William Yeo wrote:
> > Ah yes, and remember Honeywell in the glorious 70's whose systems used 
> > 36 bits arranged as 6 6-bit bytes or 4 9-bit bytes depending on whether 
> > you're in batch or timesharing mode.
> 
> But were these actually called "bytes"? That's the
> crucial thing here. I can remember such units being
> referred to as "characters" or some such, but not
> "bytes".

Well, I did leave a lot of brain cells back there in the 70s (8-/) but 
as I recall both terms were used (i.e. "bytes" and "characters") more or 
less interchangably by the users here.

Perhaps we were abusing the terms even then ;-)

Will