A byte is a unit of data that usually consists of 8 bits but can also be composed of 9 or 16 bits. The word "byte" has been variously explained as standing for "Binary Yoked Transfer Element," "Bit asYnchronous Transmission Element," or "BinarY TErm," but these explanations are fictional; the word "bite" actually came first in this usage, as a humorous play off the word "bit." That is, if a little information is a "bit," then more is a "bite." But "bite" looks too much like "bit" on paper, so when computer scientist Werner Buchholz suggested "bite" to mean "a group of bits used to encode a character" in 1956, he also suggested the spelling "byte" to avoid confusion. "Byte" is abbreviated "B," as in "16 GB (gigabyte) hard drive."

Its 8 bits allows the byte to take on 2⁸ = 256 possible states. Arranged as a sequence of base-2 integer numbers, these 256 different bytes can...