The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications. It is an ordered collection of bits, in which each bit denotes the binary value of 1 or 0. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in a computer and it is for this reason the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The size of a byte is typically hardware dependent, but the modern de facto standard is 8 bits, as this is a convenient power of 2. Other factors behind this particular size may be the IBM System/360 architecture, introduced in the 1960s, and the 8-bit microprocessors, introduced in the 1970s. No formal definition exists however, and other sizes have been used in various computers historically.The term octet is widely used as a precise synonym of the 8-bit byte where ambiguity is undesirable, such as in communications protocol definitions.

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