Comment by adrian_b

Octets is the term used in most international standards instead of the American "byte".

"Octet" has the advantage that it is not ambiguous. In old computer documentation, from the fifties to the late sixties, a "byte" could have meant any size between 6 bits and 16 bits, the same like "word", which could have meant anything between 8 bits and 64 bits, including values like 12 bits, 18 bits, 36 bits, 60 bits, or even 43 bits.

Traditionally, computer memory is divided in pages, which are divided in lines, which are divided in words, which are divided in bytes. However the sizes of any of those "units" has varied in very wide ranges in the early computers.

IBM System/360 has chosen the 8-bit byte, and the dominance of IBM has then forced this now ubiquitous meaning of "byte", but there were many computers before System/360 and many coexisting for some years with the IBM 360 and later mainframes, where byte meant something else.