[pedroaniceto]

'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.

[titanomachy]

English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.

[jdblair]

The term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s.

Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

[toast0]

Like the sibling says, octet is useful when in a networking context, because bytes weren't uniformly sized, but also because communications protocols were sometimes only 7-bit.

Serial ports and modems often operated in that mode, and UUCP influenced mail and newsgroups to only use 7-bit data; requiring encoding for data with the high bit set. Protocols that specify octets are dealing with 8-bit bytes and don't have to deal with that.