Byte is a term used in the systems area to define the unit of digital information equivalent to an ordered set of bits (generally eight). This term comes from the English word “bite”, which means “bite”, referring to the smallest amount of data that a computer can store or “bite” at the same time. It does not have a special symbology, in some countries such as France it is interpreted with the letter “o”, while in the Anglo-Saxons it is common to identify them with the “B” to differentiate it from the bit, whose symbol is lowercase. outside transmission.
The word byte was coined by Werner Buchholz more than fifty years ago, in the midst of advances in the IBM 7030 Stretch computers. Each byte means a single character of text on a computer, which can be letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation marks, etc.; different information encoding in the same computer, depending on the amount. For example: 1B corresponds to a letter, 10 B corresponds to a word or two, while 100 B corresponds to a sentence or two. The byte has several multiples, among them are the kilobyte (1000 bytes), megabyte (1,000,000 bytes), among others.
The function of the bytes is to indicate to the user the storage capacity that some devices have, such as a pen drive, a CD, a DVD or a RAM memory. It is common for a CD to store 700 megabytes, while a DVD exceeds gigabytes. However, you can find artifacts of this class on the market, up to 4.8 and 10 gigabytes.
