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Comment by zorked | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in Portugal. Interesting.

'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.

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

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

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.

In Brazil the vocabulary changed a lot from the 80s onward too.

I was used to reading everything in English, so Brazilian computer books and magazines would always read strange to me. Then in the 90s everything just moved to American vocabulary.

The strangest word I recall in this context is the use of "alça" for handle.

Brazil had a bad problem with technical books being translated by generalist translators who just looked up the word in the dictionary and used the first translation they saw. So many translations are extremely hard to read because of that.

Yep. The literal translation for "edge-triggered flip-flop" still stands as one of the weirdest, most bizarre things I ever read as a Continental Portuguese student.

Never read another Brazilian technical translation ever agin.

Ordinateur in French, still.

Ordenador in Spanish, still.

Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American thing

They appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to have taken over.

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