Type to use to represent a byte in ANSI (C89/90) C?

Is there a standards-complaint method to represent a byte in ANSI (C89/90) C? I know that, most often, a char happens to be a byte, but my understanding is that this is not guaranteed to be the case. Also, there is stdint.h in the C99 standard, but what was used before C99?

I'm curious about both 8 bits specifically, and a "byte" (sizeof(x) == 1).