Byte
The byte ( /ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. With ISO/IEC 80000-13, this common meaning was codified in a formal standard. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.
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Some articles on byte:
... Byte is a redesigned Bit but is identical in design and speaks in the same distorted voice ... Unlike Bit, Byte is able to speak full English ...
... The byte is also defined as a data type in certain programming languages ... and C++ programming languages, for example, define byte as an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment" (clause 3.6 of the C standard) ... implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte ...
... All operations are byte-oriented ... In each round, the bytes of the block are first permuted ... Then each byte is XORed with a key byte and an earlier ciphertext byte, processed through the S-box, and XORed with the previous plaintext byte ...
... Cycles per byte (sometimes abbreviated cpb) is a unit of measurement which indicates the number of clock cycles a microprocessor will perform per byte (usually of octet size) of data ...
... Little-endian representation simplifies hardware in processors that add multi-byte integral values a byte at a time, such as small-scale byte-addressable ... As carry propagation must start at the least significant bit (and thus byte), multi-byte addition can then be carried out with a monotonic incrementing ... that it can hop forward to the least significant byte, then count back down towards the most significant ...