byte

A byte is a unit of digital information storage, typically eight bits long. In modern computer systems, a byte is the smallest addressable unit of memory and can represent 256 distinct values. It is commonly used to encode characters in text encodings; for example, ASCII uses one byte per character, while Unicode text in UTF-8 may use one to four bytes per character.

History: The term byte was coined by IBM researcher Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the design of the System/360 to denote a group of eight bits. Earlier machines sometimes used bytes of six, seven, or nine bits. After standardization, eight-bit bytes became the norm and the byte became the fundamental unit for memory addressing and data sizing.

Size and prefixes: Data sizes are expressed in bytes and larger units such as kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes. There is a potential ambiguity between decimal prefixes (kB = 1,000 bytes) and binary prefixes (KiB = 1,024 bytes). To reduce confusion, many contexts distinguish them. A nibble is four bits and a word is a processor-defined size of bits.

Usage: The byte is the key unit for memory addressing, storage, and data transmission. Text is stored as bytes in most formats; ASCII uses one byte per character, and Unicode in UTF-8 uses variable-length bytes. While the eight-bit byte is standard in most contemporary systems, some historical or specialized architectures have differed, underscoring that the byte is a practical, though historically nuanced, concept in computing.