byte

noun

Etymology: An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.

1. A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.
2. A unit of computing storage equal to eight bits, which can represent any of 256 distinct values.

   “The word “hello” fits into five bytes of ASCII code.”

   “If you look at the photograph of the interior of the Spectrum[…], you will see that there is one ROM chip, and 16 smaller RAM chips. These chips give the Spectrum its memory. The memory consists of 65536 storage units that each contain one byte (a number from 0 to 255).”