Byte

The byte (/ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.

The unit octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the byte. The usage of the term octad(e) for 8 bits is no longer common today.

Bytes (album)

Bytes is an album by Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie, under the name Black Dog Productions.

Background

The album was released in 1993 on double vinyl, cassette and CD and later re-released in 2005. Today, both Ed Handley and Andy Turner form part of Plaid while Ken Downie continues to produce music under the name The Black Dog. All three collaborated on the album under various guises and combinations. Bytes was launched on the Sheffield techno label Warp Records as WARPCD8 in 1993. An early version of "Clan (Mongol Hordes)" appears on Artificial Intelligence as "The Clan".

Track listing

References

External links