  Polar codes are considered the latest major breakthrough in coding theory.
Polar codes were introduced by Ar{\i}kan in 2008. In this letter, we show that
the binary polar codes are the same as the optimized codes for bitwise
multistage decoding (OCBM), which have been discovered before by Stolte in
2002. The equivalence between the techniques used for the constructions and
decodings of both codes is established.
