Byte (B)
Modern equivalent
8 bits
Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 and deliberately misspelled to prevent accidental mutation to "bit".
Coined by Werner Buchholz at IBM in 1956 and deliberately misspelled, bite becoming byte, so that a typist’s slip could never turn it into bit. Its capital B is the one in every unit above it: the B in KB, MB, GB, TB and PB is this word, which makes the byte the only unit in this archive to have lent its initial to an entire ladder. Eight bits is not a law of nature but a convention that won. Early machines used bytes of six, seven and nine bits, and the term originally meant whatever group of bits a particular computer handled at once. The IBM System/360 of 1964 settled on eight, the industry followed, and the question stopped being asked.