Byte
A byte is a unit of data that usually consists of 8 bits but can also be composed of 9 or 16 bits. The word "byte" has been variously explained as standing for "Binary Yoked Transfer Element," "Bit asYnchronous Transmission Element," or "BinarY TErm," but these explanations are fictional; the word "bite" actually came first in this usage, as a humorous play off the word "bit." That is, if a little information is a "bit," then more is a "bite." But "bite" looks too much like "bit" on paper, so when computer scientist Werner Buchholz suggested "bite" to mean "a group of bits used to encode a character" in 1956, he also suggested the spelling "byte" to avoid confusion. "Byte" is abbreviated "B," as in "16 GB (gigabyte) hard drive."
Its 8 bits allows the byte to take on 28 = 256 possible states. Arranged as a sequence of base-2 integer numbers, these 256 different bytes can be interpreted as the numbers between 00000000 (decimal 0) and 11111111 (decimal 255). The 256 possible bytes can, however, be used to symbolize any 256 (or fewer) objects or concepts; 256 species of bird, 256 Chinese words, or 256 numbers starting with (say) 513 rather than 0. The assignment of readings to bytes is symbolic and arbitrary, purely a matter of convenience. Thus, along with numbers, a common use of the 256 bytes is to symbolize alphanumeric characters and special characters such as a question marks, pound signs, the "plus" and "minus" signs.
Inside a computer, groups of 2, 4, or 8 bytes are further combined into words. In computer memory, words are grouped into "pages," standard-sized data blocks of, typically, 500-8,000 bytes. The word is the working data quantum of the computer: that is, the computer never processes or transmits internally a block of data that is shorter than a word. The size of the words used by a computer's central processing unit (CPU) depends on the physical structure of the CPU. For example, a 32-bit processor has a data path all the elements of which (bus, registers, arithmetic-logic unit) are 32 bits wide, and so processes 4-byte words (8 bits/byte x 4 bytes = 32 bits).
Because a byte represents such a small amount of information, the large quantities of information stored in computer memory systems are designated by larger units, usually bytes grouped by powers of 2: kilobytes or KB (210 = 1,024 bytes per KB), megabytes or MB (220 = 1,048,576 bytes per MB), gigabytes or GB (230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes per GB), terabytes or TB (240 1,099,500,000,000 bytes per TB). For simplicity 1 KB is often regarded as simply one thousand bytes, 1 MB as one million bytes, 1 GB as one billion bytes, and 1 TB as one trillion bytes. A 1.44 MB computer diskette can hold approximately 1.5 million alphanumeric characters, the equivalent of a thick book (750 pages at 2,000 characters per page).
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