What is a byte?

• Computers only store and work with bits
  • Binary, 1 or 0, on or off
• The 128 ASCII characters could be represented with 7 bits
  • \(2^7=128\)
  • An 8th bit was later added as computers moved more towards powers of 2
• 8 bits make a byte (a whole ASCII character)
  • In a pure conversion, 100 characters == 100 bytes
  • This is often not straightforward since the file itself or anything else can take up more space