"David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com> said:
> IP header length is measured in octets, so how is this possible?
> :-)
1 octet == 8 bits in RFC-speak. "Byte" is the name given to character
units. There were machines around with non-8-bit bytes. AFAIR, DEC PDP-10
had the options of 6, 7, or 8 bits/byte in 36 bit words. Purely historical
now, since (AFAIK) everybody has agreed with IBM (S/360?) that 1 byte == 8
bits. As Brian Reid (IIRC) used to say: "It is spelled 'o-c-t-e-t' and
pronounced 'byte'"
-- Horst von Brand vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl Casilla 9G, Vin~a del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Sep 07 2001 - 21:00:22 EST