Byte

A byte describes 8 bits of binary data.

It is considered one of the main denominations of information transfer and storage in computing, and is what is referred to by the megabytes of RAM and the gigabytes of storage.

A single byte may represent one of 256 different states, usually numbered 0 through to 255.

Do not confuse a byte with a character, as a character may be more than one byte in size. The common UTF-8 encoding uses one to four bytes per character.