<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> It has been suggested that Octet (computing) be merged into this article . (Discuss) Proposed since March 2017 . </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> It has been suggested that Octet (computing) be merged into this article . (Discuss) Proposed since March 2017 . </Td> </Tr> <P> 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--byte - sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past . The modern de-facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO / IEC 2382 - 1: 1993, 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 eight - bit size . </P> <P> The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper - case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in contrast to the bit, whose IEEE symbol is a lower - case b . Internationally, the unit octet, symbol o, explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte . </P>

What is the standard unit of data storage