History
The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit.
Early computers used a variety of 4-bit binary coded decimal (BCD) representations and the 6-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army (Fieldata) and Navy. These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to 7 bits of coding, called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) as the Federal Information Processing Standard which replaced the incompatible teleprinter codes in use by different branches of the U.S. government. ASCII included the distinction of upper and lower case alphabets and a set of control characters to facilitate the transmission of written language as well as printing device functions, such as page advance and line feed, and the physical or logical control of data flow over the transmission media. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the 8-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), an expansion of their 6-bit binary-coded decimal (BCDIC) representation used in earlier card punches. The prominence of the System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the 8-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different.
In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony first on long-distance trunk lines. These used the 8-bit ยต-law encoding. This large investment promised to reduce transmission costs for 8-bit data. The use of 8-bit codes for digital telephony also caused 8-bit data octets to be adopted as the basic data unit of the early Internet.
The development of 8-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. Microprocessors such as the Intel 8008, the direct predecessor of the 8080 and the 8086, used in early personal computers, could also perform a small number of operations on four bits, such as the DAA (Decimal Add Adjust) instruction, and the auxiliary carry (AC/NA) flag, which were used to implement decimal arithmetic routines. These four-bit quantities are sometimes called nibbles, and correspond to hexadecimal digits.
The term octet is used to unambiguously specify a size of eight bits, and is used extensively in protocol definitions, for example.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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This book or that, come to this hallowed place
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