the.com/bytes
eight bits pretending to be a single unit, because computers needed a smallest unit of gossip.
means a byte is a group of 8 bits, the basic chunk computers use to store one character, number, or tiny piece of data.
from coined around 1956 by ibm engineer werner buchholz while designing the ibm 7030 stretch, deliberately misspelling bite so it wouldn't get mangled to bit; 8 bits became standard because it neatly encoded a single character.
origin worddeliberately spelled to avoid confusion with bit
early sizessome machines used 6 or 7 bit bytes
one byteholds exactly 256 possible values
kilobyte myth1024 bytes, not 1000, technically
for instance
ibm stretch — 1956 machine that gave us the term byte
ascii table — maps 128 characters into single bytes since 1963
utf-8 — encodes text using 1 to 4 bytes per character