the.com/byte
eight bits standing in formation, just to spell a single letter
means A unit of digital information made up of eight bits, typically enough to store a single character of text.
from Coined in 1956 by Werner Buchholz, an engineer at IBM working on the Stretch computer. It's a deliberate respelling of 'bite' — a small chunk of data the machine could chew at once — with the 'i' swapped to 'y' to avoid confusion with 'bit.' The smaller scrap, the nibble (half a byte), later carried the food metaphor forward with a wink.
- origin
- coined in 1956 to avoid confusing 'bit' with 'bite'
- size
- a byte holds 256 possible values
- nibble
- half a byte is officially called a nibble
- variable past
- early bytes ranged from 1 to 12 bits
- capacity
- one byte stores exactly one ASCII character