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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method for representing numbers that uses only two symbols for the natural numbers: typically "0" and "1" . A binary number may also refer to a rational number that has a finite representation in the binary numeral system, that is, the quotient of an ...
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, is an invention by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (English: Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic) which uses only the characters 1 and 0, and some remarks on its usefulness. Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern ...
Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 through 9, which combine to form numbers. In an octal system, there are only 8 digits, 0 through 7.
1 byte: A number from 0 to 255; 90 bytes: Enough to store a typical line of text from a book; 512 bytes = 0.5 KiB: The typical sector size of an old style hard disk drive (modern Advanced Format sectors are 4096 bytes). 1024 bytes = 1 KiB: A block size in some older UNIX filesystems; 2048 bytes = 2 KiB: A CD-ROM sector
For this reason, bit index is not affected by how the value is stored on the device, such as the value's byte order. Rather, it is a property of the numeric value in binary itself. This is often utilized in programming via bit shifting: A value of 1 << n corresponds to the n th bit of a binary integer (with a value of 2 n).
Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble . In information theory , one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [ 3 ] or the information that is gained when the value of such a ...
Computers rarely modify individual bits for performance reasons. Instead, data is aligned in groups of a fixed number of bits, usually 1 byte (8 bits). Hence, "binary data" in computers are actually sequences of bytes. On a higher level, data is accessed in groups of 1 word (4 bytes) for 32-bit systems and 2 words for 64-bit systems.