Why Is 1 Byte Equal to 8 Bits? [Closed]

Why not 4 bits, or 16 bits?

I assume some hardware-related reasons and I'd like to know how 8bit 1byte became the standard.

I'ts been a minute since I took computer organization, but the relevant wiki on 'Byte' gives some context.

The byte was originally the smallest number of bits that could hold a single character (I assume standard ASCII). We still use ASCII standard, so 8 bits per character is still relevant. This sentence, for instance, is 41 bytes. That's easily countable and practical for our purposes.

If we had only 4 bits, there would only be 16 (2^4) possible characters, unless we used 2 bytes to represent a single character, which is more inefficient computationally. If we had 16 bits in a byte, we would have a whole lot more 'dead space' in our instruction set, we would allow 65,536 (2^16) possible characters, which would make computers run less efficiently when performing byte-level instructions, especially since our character set is much smaller.

Additionally, a byte can represent 2 nibbles. Each nibble is 4 bits, which is the smallest number of bits that can encode any numeric digit from 0 to 9 (10 different digits).

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David Miller

David Miller

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David Miller brings 15 years of experience in global economics, personal finance strategy, and market dynamics. He specializes in turning complex economic trends into actionable insights for everyday readers.

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