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byte

A '''byte''' is a group of 8 bits. As a bit is one binary digit, a byte can be used to represent any number from 0 to 255.

A byte is the basic unit for data storage and manipulation, as well as measuring information-handling capacity.

One half of a byte (4 bits) is called a '''nibble'''.

A byte can also be called a word, two bytes can also be called a dword and four can be called a qword. I also think that eight bytes is called a uword, but I'm not sure.

For larger quantities of bytes, we use the metric system prefixes for sizing, with one notable exception: due to the binary nature of bytes, we do not separate them exactly into groups of 1000, as the metric system would normally suggest. Instead, we use a factor of 1024 to scale the measurements. Thus:

1 kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 bytes
1 megabyte (MB) = 1,024 kilobytes = 1,048,576 bytes
1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 megabytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
1 terabyte (TB) = 1,024 gigabytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
1 petabyte (PB) = 1,024 terabytes = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes


In most simple text editors, one can usefully think of a byte as representing one character. It is useful to get a feel for the amount of space in bytes taken up by various different types of files, data and processes, as this can have an effect on storage space and machine performance.

last edited (December 8, 2002) by KDivad Leahcim, Number of views: 10018, Current Rev: 4 (Diff)

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