Byte addressing 8 bits; in fact, depending on the platform, byte sizes of 1 to 48 bits have been used in the past. Therefore, the term "octet" is used where the context makes byte-length ambiguous. For example, in the 1980s, Honeywell mainframes had 36-bit words, and were byte-addressable in 9-bit bytes, or "nonets", They used 7- or 8-bit character codes, either of which were stored one to each 9-bit byte, making characters individually addressable. To illustrate why byte addressing is useful, consider the IBM 7094, which is word-addressable and has no concept of a byte. It has 36-bit words, and stores its
Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing end of the packet. There are two equivalent ways to describe the COBS encoding process: These examples show how various data sequences would be encoded by the COBS algorithm. In the examples, all bytes are expressed as hexadecimal values, and encoded data is shown with text formatting to illustrate various features: Below is a diagram using example 3 from above table, to illustrate how each modified data byte is located, and how it is identified as a data byte or an end of frame byte. Examples 7 through 10 show how the overhead varies depending on the data being encoded