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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits.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. A more accurate, but less commonly used name for 8 bits is octet.
Historical lowest retail price of computer memory and storage Electromechanical memory used in the IBM 602, an early punch multiplying calculator Detail of the back of a section of ENIAC, showing vacuum tubes Williams tube used as memory in the IAS computer c. 1951 8 GB microSDHC card on top of 8 bytes of magnetic-core memory (1 core is 1 bit.)
In computer architecture, 256-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 256 bits (32 octets) wide. Also, 256-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers , address buses , or data buses of that size.
When b is 2, the unit is the shannon, equal to the information content of one "bit". A system with 8 possible states, for example, can store up to log 2 8 = 3 bits of information. Other units that have been named include: Base b = 3 the unit is called "trit", and is equal to log 2 3 (≈ 1.585) bits. [3] Base b = 10
An 8-bit register can store 2 8 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 8 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two most common representations, the range is 0 through 255 (2 8 − 1) for representation as an binary number, and −128 (−1 × 2 7) through 127 (2 7 − 1) for representation as two's complement.
IPv6 routes computer network traffic amongst a 128-bit range of addresses. ZFS is a 128-bit file system. 128 bits is a common key size for symmetric ciphers and a common block size for block ciphers in cryptography. The IBM i Machine Interface defines all pointers as 128-bit. The Machine Interface instructions are translated to the hardware's ...
The basic unit of memory, the "byte", was defined as 8 bits, with larger units such as "words" defined with sizes that were multiples of 8 bits, with many consequences. Many competing computers at the time used word sizes that were multiples of 6 bits.