[jasonm23]

True, but I think calling this usage archaic is still ok(ish) unless we are in pedantic mode, and of course sometimes we must.

Since you say yourself, non-8 bit bytes are no longer at large.

I agree certainly that in networking and when dealing with just legacy ASCII, byte is an imprecise term.

[notalaser]

I think I was a bit too careful not to hyperbolize and I ended up doing the opposite. Non-8-bit bytes are still very common in terms of numbers. For instance, SHARC DSPs, (unfortunately...) one of the most popular DSP family, operates with 32-bit bytes, if my (repressed) memory serves correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot, lot more deployments of such systems than iPhones. Same goes for telecom and friends. There are a lot of such systems, I'm mentioning SHARC because it's the one I programmed most recently and can probably still do a decent job answering questions about it.

Given the different programming : manufacturing ratio of these systems, I'm not surprised that they see less exposure in the programming community, but it's not a matter of pedantry, it's really a matter of correct use and not being creeped out when the compiler insists that sizeof(char) and sizeof(int) are both 1, on a 32-bit machine.