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One byte is a unit of digital information typically consisting of eight bits. In modern computer architectures, a byte is the smallest addressable unit of memory and is commonly used to store a single character or a small integer. A byte can represent 256 distinct values (2^8); unsigned data range from 0 to 255, while signed data using two's complement range from -128 to 127. While ASCII characters fit in seven bits, a byte is used to store their 8-bit extended forms or other encodings.

Historically, some machines used bytes of different lengths, but the eight-bit byte has become the standard since the late 20th century. The concept of a byte underpins memory addressing, file sizes, and data transfer; it is the basic unit that computers read and write.

For larger quantities, bytes are grouped in powers of two: kilobyte (KB) or kibibyte (KiB), megabyte (MB/MiB), gigabyte (GB/GiB), terabyte (TB/TiB), with KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB preferred in precise contexts. In decimal usage, 1 KB equals 1,000 bytes, and 1 MB equals 1,000,000 bytes, though this differs from binary prefixes in many systems. Some contexts still use the term 'byte' with the symbol B, as in 256 B.

The notion of a byte as eight bits remains a foundational concept in computer science, memory design, and data encoding, including standard character sets, file systems, and network protocols.