Byte is a measurement unit used to describe storage capacity and transmission capacity in computer information, and is the basic storage unit of computer.[1]A byte consists of 8 adjacent binary bits, and each bit consists of 0 or 1.Byte is the smallest operable storage unit in computer technology.The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) designate the unit symbol of bytes as capital letter B.
The basic unit of information that a computer stores and processes.A byte consists of 8 binary bits, from 00000000 to 11111111. All the binary bits that make up the byte are processed by the computer as a unit.Bytes can represent a single character or a number between 0 and 255.[2]When viewing the file size, bytes are the minimum metric size listed by the operating system.
Development history
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The word "byte" was invented by Werner Buchholz in the early design stage of IBM Stretch computer in June 1956. Werner Buchholz needed a term to describe the information block processed by the machine, so he put forward the term "byte".When considering the composition of bytes, the arrangement of any number of bits from 1 to 12 bits was initially considered based on the calculation efficiency.
In the early days, people used 5-bit binary numbers as the basic unit, but it could only represent 32 different meanings, and could not include all uppercase letters and lowercase letters.Then, some computers use 6-bit binary numbers to represent characters. It can represent 64 characters at most, which is enough to represent all uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers, but not enough for other symbols and spaces.ASCII defines a 7-bit character set, which has been sufficient for many purposes for a long time, and has also become the basis of most newer character sets (ISO 646, ISO 8859, Unicode, ISO 10646, etc.).
The hardware characteristics of binary computers encourage people to set the standard to a more convenient power of 2. The 8 bits are slightly larger than the 7 bits, which will not cause too much waste, and also meet the needs of computer designers to define other characters.With the birth of the 8-bit processor Intel 8086, 8-bit bytes have become the standard.The international standard IEC 80000-13 defines this common meaning, and the popularity of major commercial computing architectures has also promoted the general acceptance of 8-bit bytes by the public.
Unit conversion
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name
Abbreviation
conversion[3]
Bit
bit/b
1B=8bit
Half byte
N
1B=0.5N
KiloByte
KB
1KB=2tenB =1024B
Mega Byte
MB
1MB=2tenKB =2twentyB
GigaByte
GB
1GB=2tenMB =2thirtyB
TeraByte
TB
1TB=2tenGB =12fortyB
PetaByte
PB
1PB=2tenTB =2fiftyB
EXAByte
EB
1EB=2tenPB =2sixtyB
Zetta Byte
ZB
1ZB=2tenEB =2seventyB
Yotta Byte
YB
1YB=2tenZB =2eightyB
application area
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data storage
Bytes play an important role in data storage. When information is stored on a computer, it is stored in bytes.Documents, images and programs are stored as bytes.The capacity of storage devices (such as hard disk, SSD, USB drive) is usually in bytes.In computer memory, each byte has a unique address, and each byte can store a character[4]。
ASCII encoding
data processing
In computer, byte is the basic unit of data processing.The CPU of the computer reads and writes data according to bytes, and executes calculation and processing instructions.In addition to bytes, the CPU can also operate on larger data units, such as words, doublewords, etc. These data units are usually composed of multiple bytes, which can represent a larger range of data.The CPU supports more complex data structures and algorithms by operating on these data units.
Network Communications
In network transmission, computers and network devices usually process and transmit data in bytes.Network protocols, such as TCP/IP, define how to divide data into byte streams and transmit them to the destination through the network.During transmission, bytes can also be used to check data integrity.For example, the checksum algorithm will calculate the sum of bytes in the packet and verify at the receiving end to ensure that the data is not tampered with or damaged during transmission.
Related concepts
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position
Bit, abbreviated as "b", read as "bit", representing 1 bit in binary system.The data in the computer is based on 0 and 1
To represent.A binary bit can only have one state, that is, it can only store binary numbers "0" or "1".Every 8 bits form a byte, which is the smallest information unit[5]
word
Word refers to a group of binary numbers processed by the CPU of the computer at the same time. A word is usually divided into several bytes.The number of digits of this group of binary numbers is "word length", which directly reflects the calculation accuracy of the computer. The longer the word length is, the more digits the computer can process at one time, and the faster the data processing speed will be.
character
Character is the abstract unit of characters and symbols, and is the smallest element that can be read and recognized by users.The character can be a letter, number, punctuation mark, space or any other symbol in the writing system.In a computer, characters are converted into byte sequences by character encoding for storage and processing.[6]
Byte order
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Endianness, also known as end order or byte order, refers to the order of bytes when multi byte data is stored in computer memory or transmitted on the network.The computer stores information in binary bit groups of various sizes. Each storage unit is assigned an address number, which is used by the computer to access data.A word usually contains multiple bytes and needs to be stored in multiple address units.The byte order belongs to the way of data interpretation and is only related to the processor architecture.There are mainly two types of byte order: Big endian and Little endian.[7]
Byte order
Big endian byte order
In this byte order, the high order byte is stored at the low address of the memory, and the low order byte is stored at the high address of the memory.The big endian byte order is close to the way numbers are written from left to right.The order of byte transmission in the network is independent of the specific CPU type, operating system and other factors. TCP/IP protocol stipulates that big endian byte order is used in network transmission, so big endian byte order is the main order used in network transmission.Processors using big endian byte order include Motorola 6800, Motorola 68000, PowerPC 970, System/370, etc.
Small endian byte order
In this byte order, the low order byte is stored at the low address of the memory, while the high order byte is stored at the high address of the memory.Small endian byte order is the main order used by most processor architectures and their related memory.Processors using small endian byte order include x86, MOS Technology 6502, Z80, VAX, PDP-11, RISC-V.
