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Byte
Abinary unit of information equal to 8bits. Unfortunately, the storage ofbinary numbers in computers is not entirely standardized. Because computers store information in 8-bit bytes (where abit is a single binary digit), depending on the "word size" of the machine, numbers requiring more than 8bits must be stored in multiple bytes. The usualFORTRAN77 integer size is 4 bytes long. However, a numberrepresented as (byte1 byte2 byte3 byte4) in a VAX would be read and interpreted as (byte4 byte3 byte2 byte1) on a Sun. The situation is even worse forfloating-point (real) numbers, which are represented in binary as amantissa andcharacteristic, and worse still for long (8-byte) reals!
The naming of large multiples of bytes follows standard SI prefixes, as summarized in the following table.
Unfortunately, there is some ambiguity in the meanings of the prefixes kilo-, mega-, etc., when applied to units of information. This arose historically out of the fact that
, so "kilobyte" was used to mean 1024 bytes, "megabyte" to mean
bytes, etc. However, such usage is now deprecated in favor of the usual SI unit prefixes, and a special set of prefixes have been invented for binary powers of information units, summarized in the table below.
See also
Baud,Bit,Crumb,Exbibyte,Gibibyte,Gigabyte,Kibibyte,Kilobyte,Mebibyte,Megabyte,Nibble,Pebibyte,Petabyte,Tebibyte,TerabyteExplore with Wolfram|Alpha
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References
Barrow, B. "A Lesson in Megabytes."IEEE Standards Bearer. p. 5, Jan. 1997.IEC 60027-2.Letter Symbols to Be Used in Electrical Technology--Part 2: Telecommunications and Electronics, 2nd ed. November 2000.National Institute of Standards. "Prefixes for Binary Multiples."http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html.Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha
ByteCite this as:
Weisstein, Eric W. "Byte." FromMathWorld--AWolfram Resource.https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Byte.html