A byte is a unit of information.
A byte is a unit of information made up of a sequence of adjacent bits . The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy indicates that byte is synonymous with octet (an eight-bit unit of information); However, the size of the byte (which comes from the English bite , "bite" ) depends on the character code in which it has been defined.
It is important to highlight the fact that there is no standard that has officially established the symbol that corresponds to the byte. So far we find that it is identified in two fundamental ways. Thus, in French-speaking countries it is represented by an "o" while in Anglo-Saxon countries it corresponds to the "B" .
Byte origin
The term was proposed by Werner Buchholz more than five decades ago, amid the development of the IBM 7030 Stretch computer. Originally, byte was used to refer to instructions that consisted of 4 bits and that allowed the inclusion of between 1 and 16 bits per byte. However, design work then narrowed the byte down to three-bit fields, allowing between 1 and 8 bits in a byte. Over time, the size of a byte was fixed at 8 bits and declared as a standard starting with IBM S/360 .
The notion of 8 bits allows us to describe, in the architecture of computers , memory addresses and other data units that can span up to 8 bits wide. The concept also allows mention of the CPU and ALU architecture that is based on registers of the same width.
It is known as a nibble , on the other hand, half of 1 eight-bit byte. Just as the byte is usually named as an octet, for the same reason the nibble can be referred to as a semioctet .
It is usually indicated that a byte is equivalent to 8 bits, although the definition depends on the character code used.
Multiples, equivalences and capacities
The byte has various multiples, such as kilobyte (1,000 bytes), megabyte (1,000,000 bytes), gibabyte (1,000,000,000 bytes) and terabyte (1,000,000,000,000 bytes), among others.
Fundamental is the role played by the byte and the rest of the aforementioned equivalences within the field of computing since they are used as measures to refer to the capacity of various devices such as, for example, RAM, a CD, a DVD or a pen drive.
Thus, for example, we know that a CD usually has a storage capacity of about 700 megabytes, a DVD usually exceeds a gigabyte and pen drives, for their part, currently present an enormous diversity of capacity. In this way, in the computer market we find devices of this type that have a capacity of 4 gigabytes, 8 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes, among others.
A latter trend that is also typical of the so-called memory cards or portable hard drives that currently have a great variety in terms of this storage property. Thus, for quite affordable and interesting prices, in large stores dedicated to the world of computers you can find hard drives of the aforementioned that even reach 1 terabyte.