byte

Definition

A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.

Etymology

An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.

Example Sentences

• "The word “hello” fits into five bytes of ASCII code."
• "If you look at the photograph of the interior of the Spectrum[…], you will see that there is one ROM chip, and 16 smaller RAM chips. These chips give the Spectrum its memory. The memory consists of 65536 storage units that each contain one byte (a number from 0 to 255)."
• "With a varchar, the storage is always the actual number of characters you have stored plus 2 bytes. So a varchar(20) with a 5-character word will take up 7 bytes, with the extra 2 bytes holding a size reference for SQL Server."

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