Byte is a unit of digital information that primarily consists of eight bits. The prefix “kilo” sometimes denotes 1024 (210) bytes. The size of a byte is eight times than that of a single character.
In computing, a byte is a unit of data that is commonly used to represent a character such as a letter, number, punctuation mark, or instruction in a computer’s memory. It is often abbreviated as “B” or “BYT.”
A byte can also be used to represent two hexadecimal digits, such as in Unicode or in some graphical formats. In these contexts, a byte is not necessarily 8 bits long and may instead refer to a code unit of some other size.
Bytes are sometimes measured in megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and terabytes (TB). It is common for modern computing hardware to utilize at least kilobytes (KB). Byte-level transmissions on a network are usually referred to as the “packing” of data or “packetzizing.” The smallest unit of information in a computer is typically referred to as a bit.
Byte has become part of many everyday expressions such as the phrase “byte me” which has become widely used in the computer world. It also forms parts of computer company names such as Microsoft and Apple’s “Byte Craft.”
In terms of computer architecture, a byte can refer either to the amount of memory occupied by one word or to the smallest size of memory addressable by a machine. The most popular system architecture today is the IBM PC architecture. On these systems, one byte is equal to eight bits, and each addressable memory location is referred to as an “addressable byte.”
