Why is 1 Byte equal to 8 Bits? 

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).

Related Posts:

  1. How many bits is a “word”?
  2. TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not ‘str’ when writing to a file in Python3
  3. What does value & 0xff do in Java?
  4. max value of integer
  5. Converting string to byte array in C#
  6. How to create an array of bits in Python?
  7. Convert bytes to int?
  8. Does sizeof return the number of bytes or the number of octets of a type in C?
  9. What is the difference between a string and a byte string?
  10. How do I initialize a byte array in Java?
  11. Implement division with bit-wise operator
  12. How to declare and use 1D and 2D byte arrays in Verilog?
  13. How to Convert Int to Unsigned Byte and Back
  14. MySQL Error #1071 – Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes
  15. Swapping 2 Bytes of Integer
  16. The difference between logical shift right, arithmetic shift right, and rotate right

Leave a Comment