<unit> /bi:t/ (B) A component in the machine data hierarchy larger than a bit and usually smaller than a word; now nearly always eight bits and the smallest addressable unit of storage. A byte typically holds one character. A byte may be 9 bits on 36-bit computers. Some older architectures used "byte" for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 and IBM 7030 supported "bytes" that were actually bit-fields of 1 to 36 (or 64) bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. It was a mutation of the word "bite" intended to avoid confusion with "bit". In 1962 he described it as "a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units". The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360 operating system (announced April 1964). James S. Jones <jsjones@graceland.edu> adds: I am sure I read in a mid-1970's brochure by IBM that outlined the history of computers that BYTE was an acronym that stood for "Bit asYnchronous Transmission E..?" which related to width of the bus between the Stretch CPU and its CRT-memory (prior to Core). Terry Carr <bear@mich.com> says: In the early days IBM taught that a series of bits transferred together (like so many yoked oxen) formed a Binary Yoked Transfer Element (BYTE). [True origin? First 8-bit byte architecture?] See also nibble, octet. [Jargon File] (2003-09-21)

<publication> A popular computing magazine. http://byte.com. (1997-03-27)

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 and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.

(bytes)

Byte addressing in hardware architectures supports accessing individual bytes. Computers with byte addressing are sometimes called byte machines, in contrast to word-addressable architectures, word machines, that access data by word.

<unit> The official ISO[?] name for 1024 bytes, to distinguish it from 1000 bytes which they call a kilobyte. "Mebibyte", "Gibibyte", etc, are prefixes for other powers of 1024. Although this new naming standard has been widely reported in 2003, it seems unlikely to catch on. (2003-09-27)

<unit> 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes = 1024 petabytes or roughly 10^18 bytes. See prefix. (1996-08-12)

<spelling> It's spelled "terabyte". (1997-01-23)

<company, storage> A company and, by extension, a tape format for computer data backup and transfer. The tape is a data quality 8mm video cassette recorder tape. Exabyte units can store between five and fourteen gigabytes of data per tape. Exabytes are usually attached to Unix workstations. [What different tape capacities exist? Compare with DAT?] (1995-07-06)