Byte

Byte


What Does Byte Mean?

A byte is a storage unit capable ofrepresenting a single character, such as a letter, number or symbol.Technically speaking, a byte is a sequence of binary bits in a serialized datastream in data transmission systems. In most computers, one byte is equated toeight smaller units called bits, although the size of a byte has always beendependent on hardware.

As specified in IEC80000-13 and IEEE 1541,the symbol for byte is an upper-case "B".



A byte iscapable of holding a string that is needed in larger application processing.For large amounts of memory, prefixes are added to bytes. For example:

  • Kilobyte = 1024 bytes

  • Megabyte = 1048576 bytes

  • Gigabyte = 1073741824 bytes.

Most computerapplications compare size and transfer rates in larger multiples of bytes likekilobytes and megabytes.

Some programminglanguages also make use of bytes as a data type. For example, C and C++ makesuse of bytes as a data type and define bytes as the addressable unit for datastorage capable of holding a single character.