The byte (/ ˈbaɪt /) is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size -- byte - sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. The modern de-facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO / IEC 2382 - 1: 1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. The international standard IEC 80000 - 13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the eight - bit size.
what is the standard unit of data storage
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