Byte is a term created by Werner Buchholz in 1957 as a digital information unit equivalent to four bits ( binary digit ) originally and subsequently as standard it was adopted that 1 byte is equivalent to eight bits. The word byte comes from bite , which means bite, as the smallest amount of data that a computer could “bite” at a time. The byte symbol is an uppercase B, to distinguish from bit, whose symbol is lowercase b. The byte is generally used in the areas of computer science and telecommunications, in the latter it is commonly called octet, which comes from the French octet, derived from the Latin octo and the Greek okto, which means eight, thus differentiating the 8-bit byte from other bytes with different bit equivalence.
The term byte is often used to specify quantity, for example, the amount of memory of a particular device or storage capacity. Example: 16 GB (gigabyte).
Each byte represents a single text character on a computer. The byte represents letters, symbols, numbers, punctuation marks, special characters, etc. and encodes different information on the same device, depending on the quantity. For example, 1 B equals one character or letter, 10 B equals one or two words, 100 B equals one or two sentences, 1 kB (1024 B) equals a very short story, 10 kB equals one page of encyclopedia, perhaps with a simple drawing, 100 kB is equivalent to a medium resolution photograph, 1 MB (1024 kB) is equivalent to a novel, 10 MB is equivalent to two copies of Shakespeare’s complete work, 100 MB is equivalent to a shelf of 1 meter of books, 1 GB (1024 MB) equals a van full of text pages, 1 TB (1024 GB) equals 50,000 trees,
The character coding called ASCII ( American Standard Code for Information Interchange ) adopted the information that 1 byte is equal to 8 bits, and using the binary system (with values 0 or 1), were defined 256 characters for text representation on computers, obtaining a pattern in this way for operations between different devices.
To express amounts of data, the following measures are used:
- 1 byte = 8 bits
- 1 kilobyte (kB or kbyte) = 1024 bytes
- 1 megabyte (MB or Mbytes) = 1024 kilobytes
- 1 gigabyte (GB or Gbytes) = 1024 megabytes
- 1 terabyte (TB or Tbytes) = 1024 gigabytes
- 1 petabyte (PB or Pbytes) = 1024 terabytes
- 1 exabyte (EB or Ebytes) = 1024 petabytes
- 1 zettabyte (ZB or Zbytes) = 1024 exabytes
- 1 yottabyte (YB or Ybytes) = 1024 zettabytes
