Unicode questions

[Terry Reedy]

On 10/25/2010 2:33 AM, Steve Holden wrote:
> On 10/25/2010 1:42 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> In message<mailman.31.1287517442.2218.python-list at python.org>, Petite
>> Abeille wrote:
>>
>>> Characters vs. Bytes
>>
>> And why do certain people insist on referring to bytes as “octets”?
>
> Because back in the old days bytes were of varying sizes on different
> architectures - indeed the DECSystem-10 and -20 had instructions that
> could be parameterized as to byte size. So octet was an unambiguous term
> for the (now standard) 8-bit byte.

As I remember, there were machines (CDC? Burroughs?) with 6-bit 
char/bytes: 26 upper-case letters, 10 digits, 24 symbols and control chars.
-- 
Terry Jan Reedy