A byte is composed of 8 bits. It is the most commonly used unit for storage. A byte allows your computer to store characters, numbers, and data. Combining a string of bytes is what gives us megabytes, kilobytes, and etc. 

So now you’re saying, "that’s great but what does a byte mean to me." Well, have you ever wondered what those weird abbreviations were on the specs for your computer data capacity, empty space on your hard drive, space on a CDROM, or space on a floppy disk. Or when you click to download a file and it starts speaking to you in Latin saying, "KB/sec or bytes/sec". Well, here is the answer. The abbreviation on your hardware or brochure is describing the capacity of the hardware to store data. The KB/sec or bytes/sec is describing to you the transfer rate of the file. In comparison, the larger the number preceding the abbreviation, the better. 

Note: The number of bits in a byte varies by chip architecture. A byte may consist of 9 bits on 36-bit computers (the 9^th bit is used for parity checking). Although, older architectures used a byte to represent 6 or 7 bits The PDP-10 and IBM 7030 supported bytes that were actually bit-fields of 1 to 36 (or 64) bits. Luckily, this usage is now obsolete. Therefore, 8-bit chip architecture is the most common and will be found in almost all of the computers today.

The origin of the word byte is very disputed: 

Some say that in the early days IBM taught that a series of bits transferred together (like so many yoked oxen) formed a Binary Yoked Transfer Element (BYTE). This is a rather comical origin and very improbable.

or

Another possible origin is that BYTE was used to stand for the acronym "Bit as Ynchronous Transmission E?????", which was related to width of the bus between the Stretch CPU and its CRT-memory. 

or

Werner Buchholz supposedly coined the term byte in 1956, during the beginnings of the IBM Stretch computer. He mutated the word "bite" to avoid confusion with "bit". In 1962, he described a byte as "a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units". 

All material and images on these pages are copyright Joseph,Ed. This page was developed for the Thinkquest1999 competition.