This article refers to the unit of binary information. Byte was also the name of a popular computer industry magazine, see Byte magazine.
A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. It is also one of the basic integral data types in many programming languages.
1 Meanings
The word "byte" has several meanings, all closely related:
- A contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits. On modern computers, an eight-bit byte or octet is by far the most common. This was not always the case. Certain older models have used six-, seven-, or nine-bit bytes - for instance on the 36-bit architecture of the PDP-10. Another example of a non eight-bit sequence is the 12-bit slab of the NCR-315 . A byte is always atomic on the system, meaning that it is the smallest addressable unit. An eight-bit byte can hold 256 possible values (28 = 256) -- enough to store an unsigned integer ranging from 0 to 255, a signed integer from -128 to 127, or a character of a seven-bit (such as ASCII) or eight-bit character encoding.
- A contiguous sequence of bits that comprises a sub-field of a longer sequence known as a word. On some computers it is possible to address bytes of arbitrary length. This usage is reflected, for example, in LDB and DPB assembly instructions for field extraction on a PDP-10, which survive as bytewise operations in Common LispCommon Lisp commonly abbreviated CL (not to be confused with Combinatory logic which is also abbreviated CL), is a dialect of Lisp, standardised by ANSI X3. Developed to standardize the divergent variants of Lisp which predated it, it is not an implementa; and in the six-bit bytes of the IBM 1401The IBM 1401 was a variable wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959 and marketed as an inexpensive "Business Computer". It was withdrawn on February 8, 1971. Although described as a ( BCD) computer, each byte (or alphameri.
- A datatypeIn computer science, a datatype (often simply type is a name or label for a set of values and some operations which can be performed on that set of values. Programming languages implicitly or explicitly support one or more datatypes; these types may act a or synonym for a datatype in certain programming languages. CThe C Programming Language Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early, for example, defines byte as a storage unit capable of at least being large enough to hold any character of the execution environment (clause 3.5 of the C standard). Since the C
char integral data type can hold at least 8 bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1), a byte in C is at least capable of holding 256 different values (signed or unsigned char doesn't matter). JavaJava is an object-oriented programming language developed primarily by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. The language, initially called Oak (named after the oak trees outside Gosling's office), was intended to replace C++, although the fea plays it simpler. Java's integral byte data type is always defined as consisting of 8 bits and being a signed data type, holding values from -128 to 127.
2 Coined
The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in 19561956 is a leap year starting on Sunday. see link for calendar) Events January January 1 End of Anglo- Egyptian Condominium in Sudan. January 16 President Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt vows to reconquer Palestine January 26 1956 Winter Olympic Games open in during the early design phase for the IBM StretchThe IBM 7030 also known as Stretch was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. The first 7030 was delivered to Los Alamos in 1961. Originally priced at $13. 5 million, its failure to meet its aggressive performance estimates forced the price to b computer. Originally it was described as one to six bits; typical I/O equipment of the period used six-bit units. The move to an eight-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit.
