Byte

Etymology
Expansion of bit, coined by Dr. Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.

Noun

 * 1)  A sequence of adjacent bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word; nearly always eight bits, which can represent an integer from 0 to 255 or a single character of text.
 * 2)  A unit of computing storage equal to eight bits
 * The word “hello” fits into five bytes of ASCII code.

Synonyms

 * B

Derived terms

 * exabyte
 * gigabyte
 * kilobyte


 * megabyte
 * petabyte
 * terabyte

Related terms

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