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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.
This timeline of binary prefixes lists events in the history of the evolution, development, and use of units of measure that are germane to the definition of the binary prefixes by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 1998, [1] [2] used primarily with units of information such as the bit and the byte.
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..
A binary prefix is a unit prefix that indicates a multiple of a unit of measurement by an integer power of two.The most commonly used binary prefixes are kibi (symbol Ki, meaning 2 10 = 1024), mebi (Mi, 2 20 = 1 048 576), and gibi (Gi, 2 30 = 1 073 741 824).
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 ...
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.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the novel from which the term was coined. In computing, endianness is the order in which bytes within a word of digital data are transmitted over a data communication medium or addressed (by rising addresses) in computer memory, counting only byte significance compared to earliness.
Byte (stylized as BYTE) was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. [ 1 ] Byte started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines.