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The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term octad(e) for eight bits is no longer common. [1] [2]
The order of magnitude of data may be specified in strictly standards-conformant units of information and multiples of the bit and byte with decimal scaling, or using historically common usages of a few multiplier prefixes in a binary interpretation which has been common in computing until new binary prefixes were defined in the 1990s..
In the context of computing, the metric prefixes are often intended to mean something other than their normal meaning. For example, 'kilobyte' often refers to 1024 bytes even though the standard meaning of kilo is 1000. Also, 'mega' normally means one million, but in computing is often used to mean 2 20 = 1 048 576. The table below illustrates ...
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 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 ...
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]
A bit can be stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in either of two possible distinct states.These may be the two stable states of a flip-flop, two positions of an electrical switch, two distinct voltage or current levels allowed by a circuit, two distinct levels of light intensity, two directions of magnetization or polarization, the orientation of reversible double ...
A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may be encoded as a sequence of 8 bits in multiple different ways (see bit numbering) so there is no unique and direct translation between bytestreams and bitstreams.