BYTE

This article is about the information storage unit. For the homophone, see bite. For other uses, see Byte (disambiguation).

The byte ( /ˈbaɪt/), is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications, that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer^[1][2] and it is for this reason the basic addressable element in many computer architectures.

The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards exist that mandate the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size. The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated with the term byte.