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The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
36 bits – size of word on Univac 1100-series computers and Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 56 bits (7 bytes) – cipher strength of the DES encryption standard 2 6: 64 bits (8 bytes) – size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values – size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number
Another origin of byte for bit groups smaller than a computer's word size, and in particular groups of four bits, is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957, which was jointly developed by Rand ...
A group of eight bits is called one byte, but historically the size of the byte is not strictly defined. [2] 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.
A group of 8 bits (8 bit) constitutes one byte (1 B). The byte is the most common unit of measurement of information (megabyte, mebibyte, gigabyte, gibibyte, etc.). The decimal SI prefixes kilo, mega etc., are powers of 10. The power of two equivalents are the binary prefixes kibi, mebi, etc. Accordingly: 1 kB = 1000 bytes = 8000 bits
This is called byte-addressable memory. Historically, many CPUs read data in some multiple of eight bits. [3] Because the byte size of eight bits is so common, but the definition is not standardized, the term octet is sometimes used to explicitly describe an eight bit sequence. A nibble (sometimes nybble), is a number composed of four bits. [4]
Bit indexing correlates to the positional notation of the value in base 2. 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.
File size is a measure of how much data a computer file contains or how much storage space it is allocated. Typically, file size is expressed in units based on byte. A large value is often expressed with a metric prefix (as in megabyte and gigabyte) or a binary prefix (as in mebibyte and gibibyte). [1]