What is bytes: Definition and 26 Discussions

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. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol (RFC 791) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7.
The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables or slab, before the term byte became common.
The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte—2 to the power of 8 is 256. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively.
The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Internationally, the unit octet, symbol o, explicitly defines a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the potential ambiguity of the term "byte".

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  1. C

    Comp Sci How can 1's complement, and 2's complement have different ranges?

    How can 1's complement, and 2's complement have different ranges? For 1's complement range is for 8 bit register(where first is for sign +, -) from - 127 to 127 and for 2's complement range is from - 128 to 127. I came accros the fact that for 1's complement we have +0 and - 0, why is that and...
  2. shivajikobardan

    Comp Sci Ipv4 fragmentation number of bytes not in multiple of 8

    Theory that I am trying to understand-: So i found a question that is relevant to this-: ->a total of 1440 bytes that is routed through an interface with MTU of 576 bytes. Calculate flag, fragmented offset, total length and data transmitted in each packet after fragmentation. Assume IP header...
  3. shivajikobardan

    MHB Solve Number of Bytes to be Transferred Not Being in Multiples of Eight in IPv4

    Theory that I am trying to understand-: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Cb2IV2YzbeqrasCd6ACQrrPo8rQVUutCMwB6eF09qc9XB0KdDbMo42ssv2S6-mjNNvbnEVeuOJA5eUrogtZacaUFjQMhoxP_s6zSUxOoKSLCjZx18cPGSRYDSSUKZKh-JOq0RYAa-TTmDb_vfQ So i found a question that is relevant to this-: ->a total of 1440 bytes...
  4. shivajikobardan

    Comp Sci Total length IP header and 65535 bytes relation-:

    So IPV4 header has a topic called "total header length" and it is of 16 bits. That means it can count from 0-65535. Book says it means IP datagram is limited to 65535 bytes. how do we get to idea of 65535 bytes? is it 1 memory location=1 byte idea? It doesn't make any sense to me(I have studied...
  5. G

    I am trying to run the avira and malware bytes in safe mode

    The first method doesn't work. The second method does work but I can't run avira and malware bytes. Can someone help? First method I hold the shift button and click the restart button. I click on troubleshoot then click on advance objects then I click on see more recovery options. The problem...
  6. A

    A Exploring Time Travel Teleportation: Computer Bytes & Radio Signals

    Time travel teleportation can be achieved in small scale experiment in millisecond. Using a computer byte in radio signals. I look forward for comments.
  7. Chris Miller

    Probability of randomly selecting 32 bytes in ascending order

    I chose the thread level for what I imagine to be the difficulty of this problem, not my own math ability. Obviously (?) there are 256^32 possible series. So knowing how (i.e., how to calculate) how many of these are in ascending order would give the answer. Is there some polynomial time algorithm?
  8. W

    I How many bits or bytes of information are present in 1 atom

    My guess is the number is huge,but I don't know what transformations from the hip Iwould use to figure this out.
  9. F

    Calculate the sum of all high-order bytes in array NUM1

    Homework Statement Calculate the sum of all hight-order bytes in array NUM1 and store the sum in a memory location named newH. Define newH as needed. Homework Equations - The Attempt at a Solution INCLUDE Irvine32.inc .data NUM1 sword 1h,2h,3h,4h,5h,6h,7h,8h,9h,10h,11h,12h,13h,14h,15h,16h...
  10. D

    How many bytes are there in a language?

    Hi everyone Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask, but I was wondering how much data there was in a language (let's say English). So for example, if you were to program a computer to speak English fluently, how much data would all the vocabulary and rules of syntax take up?Thanks
  11. T

    What determines bytes per second a computer can process?

    What are the factors which determines how many bytes / kilobytes / gigabytes of data a computer can process every second? Are there any equations / formula / rules that can be used to work this out.
  12. F

    MHB How many bytes contain exactly two 1's?

    How many bytes contain exactly two 1's? The answer key give \binom{8}{2} and I don't get why. Even if two bytes have been taken there are still 2^6 ways to arrange the other bytes, which is much larger than 28.
  13. A

    How Many Bytes Does Float Occupy Inside PIC Microcontroller?

    Homework Statement How many bytes does a variable of float data type occupy in the data memory of PIC microcontroller? Homework Equations None The Attempt at a Solution All I know, is that float data type has a size of 4 bytes, that's 32 bits. I'm not sure if it occupies...
  14. R

    MIPS Assembly and working with bytes

    Homework Statement I need to put in a byte in register $s1 that is 0b10101011 Homework Equations add addi lb sb $zero (if needed) The Attempt at a Solution I attempted at putting in a byte in register $s1 as follows: add $s1, $zero, 0b10101011 however it throws an error, I...
  15. S

    Why does tcpdump only capture the first 68 bytes of a packet?

    By default TCPDUMP limits the number of bytes it captures to 68. Why did they select 68 bytes? Does anyone know why?
  16. L

    Understanding Binary Signals and the Mystery of Bytes

    Each signal that arrives at a gate cannot be a byte, or if it is, can only be 11111111 or 00000000. Also the outcome of each gate is 000...000 or 111...111. So where are the bytes? (The question might be wrong but if I knew the right question I guess I would had known the answer too).
  17. L

    How to copy 2 bytes from a file an put into result variable?

    Hi! I don't know if I am even wording this right but here goes. I have to write a programme to read two data files into C++, then ouput as one file in the same format. The two files are files of 10 bit data. Each 10-bit recorded value is represented by a 16 bit word, of which the top 6...
  18. Char. Limit

    Is it possible to find out how many bytes of data one chromosome holds?

    Is it possible to find out how many bytes of data one chromosome (say, Chromosome 1 for humans) carries? Does the question have any meaning?
  19. T

    Bits, Bytes, transmission rates

    Problem : a) A good sized English book has about 100000 words. If an average English word is six characters long and each character needs 1 byte, show that the book can be stored in 600 kbyte of memory and show that the text takes nearly 5 seconds to be transmitted at 1 Mbit s-¹. Show that it...
  20. T

    Bytes for surfing the internet?

    How many megabytes does it take to say surf two hours of internet a day for a month (without downloading anything substantial like songs or movies etc)?
  21. D

    Fortran How many bytes in DIMENSION? - A Fortran Question

    How many bytes in DIMENSION?? - A Fortran Question I'm looking at some Fortran code. Some variables are of type dimension. How do I tell if these variables are integers or floating points numbers? How do I know if they are signed or unsigned? How do I tell the number of bytes occupied by...
  22. D

    Adding bytes with 4-bit full adders

    hi guys...my question is kinda weird.. i want to add 1 byte to another 1 byte and get the result on 7-segments :grumpy: i have to use the ICs 74283 (4- bit full adder)... and i no how to connect them to add 1byte + 1 byte but i am still lost on how to get the output on 7segments ...
  23. M

    Confused on how they figured out bytes, book example:

    The Intrinsity caches are 16 KB caches and have 256 blocks with 16 words per block. Thus data is 64 bytes = 512 bytes. The tag field is 18 bits (32 - (8 + 6)). Total bits = 256 x (Data + Tag + Valid) = 256 x (512 bits + 18 bits + 1 bit) = 135,936 bitsI'm confused on how they got 64 bytes...
  24. R

    A googolplex YB is 10^124 bytes

    a googol YB is 10^124 bytes im wanting to know how much that is in Terrabytes. anyone know?
  25. T

    XOR of Multiple Bytes - Procedure and Methods

    Hi, Short question, I have to XOR multiple bytes. Is the right procedure to XOR first and second byte then XOR the result with the third byte and so on? Or is there a different method? t.
  26. C

    Bits and Bytes: Understanding the Fundamentals of Binary Representation

    Hello everyone I am enrolled in a AP Computer Science course. Currently we are learning about bits and bytes. Could someone please explain the concept of bits and bytes. For example, here are some questions that I have tried doing: 1. 16-bit binary numbers can be used to represent all...
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