Byte

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
This article is about the unit of information. For other uses, see Byte
(disambiguation).
byte
Unit system units derived from bit
Unit of digital information, data size
Symbol B or (when referring to exactly 8 bits) o
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight
bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits
used to encode a single character of text in a computer[1][2] and for this reason
it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.

The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive
standards existed that mandated the size � byte-sizes from 1[3] to 48 bits[4] are
known to have been used in the past.[5][6] Early character encoding systems often
used six bits, and machines using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common into the
1960s. These machines most commonly had memory words of 12, 24, 36, 48 or 60 bits,
corresponding to two, four, six, eight or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bytes in
the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables, before the term byte
became common.

The modern de-facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993,

is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte (2 in
power of 8 = 256, where zero signifies a number as well).[7] The international
standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use
information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize
for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures
has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the eight-bit size.[8] Modern
architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes.