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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.
The byte has been a commonly used unit of measure for much of the information age to refer to a number of bits.In the early days of computing, it was used for differing numbers of bits based on convention and computer hardware design, but today means 8 bits.
Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture, but today it almost always means eight bits – that is, an octet. An 8-bit byte can represent 256 (2 8) distinct values, such as non-negative integers from 0 to 255, or signed integers from −128 to ...
Very often, when referring to the word size of a modern computer, one is also describing the size of address space on that computer. For instance, a computer said to be "32-bit" also usually allows 32-bit memory addresses; a byte-addressable 32-bit computer can address 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes of memory, or 4 gibibytes (GiB). This allows one ...
Industrial version of the IBM PC XT [33] [34] Industrial Computer 5531: 5531-011 April 1984: Unknown ISA, 8-bit 8 3 Intel 8088: 4.77 256 KB 640 KB 1.2 MB none Industrial version of the IBM PC XT [33] [34] [35] Industrial Computer 5531: 5531-021 May 1985: Unknown ISA, 8-bit 8 3 Intel 8088: 4.77 256 KB 640 KB 1.2 MB 20 MB Industrial version ...
Alternatively many word-oriented machines implement byte operations with instructions using special byte pointers in registers or memory. For example, the PDP-10 byte pointer contained the size of the byte in bits (allowing different-sized bytes to be accessed), the bit position of the byte within the word, and the word address of the data ...
The IBM System/360 of the 1960s was an early 32-bit computer; it had 32-bit integer registers, although it only used the low order 24 bits of a word for addresses, resulting in a 16 MiB (16 × 1024 2 bytes) address space. 32-bit superminicomputers, such as the DEC VAX, became common in the 1970s, and 32-bit microprocessors, such as the Motorola ...
The ISQ symbols for the bit and byte are bit and B, respectively.In the context of data-rate units, one byte consists of 8 bits, and is synonymous with the unit octet.The abbreviation bps is often used to mean bit/s, so that when a 1 Mbps connection is advertised, it usually means that the maximum achievable bandwidth is 1 Mbit/s (one million bits per second), which is 0.125 MB/s (megabyte per ...