maskinbyte

Maskinbyte is a term used in computing, primarily in Norwegian, to describe the basic unit of data storage that a processor can address. In practice, a maskinbyte is the smallest addressable unit of memory in a computer architecture. Its size is architecture-dependent; on modern systems it is typically eight bits, but historical and some specialized machines have used six, seven, or nine bits per byte.

In everyday computing, a maskinbyte can represent values from 0 to 255 if interpreted as unsigned, and from -128 to 127 if interpreted as signed on eight-bit platforms. Many programming languages define a byte-type that corresponds to this unit, with the exact range depending on whether the type is signed or unsigned. Larger data types are built from multiple maskinbytes, making the order of bytes (endianness) relevant when interpreting multi-byte values.

Character encoding often operates at the byte level. ASCII encodes one character per maskinbyte, while UTF-8 uses a varying number of bytes (one to four) for different characters. Memory capacity and data transfer rates are commonly specified in bytes and multiples (kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte).

History and usage: the term byte originated in the early days of computing, and eight-bit bytes became the de facto standard during the 1960s and 1970s with many mainstream architectures. Although the eight-bit byte is now the norm in most parts of the world, some historical systems and niche devices still used non-8-bit bytes, reminding us that the exact size of a maskinbyte can be architecture-specific.

See also: bit, byte, endianness, word, character encoding, ASCII, UTF-8.