View source for Octet

An '''octet''' is an 8-[[bit]] unit of data. Although the term [[byte]] is now basically a synonym, a separate term was needed in the early days of work on the [[TCP/IP]] [[protocol suite]], because in the earlier [[Network Control Program|NCP]] protocol suite of the [[ARPANET]], 'bytes' of variable length were supported. (That was as a result of the prevalence of machines such as [[PDP-10]], whose [[instruction set architecture|ISA]] directly supported variable-length bytes.)

[[Category: Basics]]