Discussion
How many bits are there in one byte?
Answer: B
Correct answer: 8
A byte is 8 bits. The convention was settled by the IBM System/360 in the 1960s and has been universal since; a byte of eight bits can represent 256 distinct values, which was enough for a character set with room to spare. A group of four bits is a nibble, and it corresponds exactly to one hexadecimal digit - which is why a byte is written as two hexadecimal characters, from 00 to FF. Above the byte the units run kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte. There is a real ambiguity here worth knowing: in the decimal convention a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes, while in the binary convention it is \( 2^{10} = 1{,}024 \). The standard prefixes for the binary values are kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte, though they are rarely used outside standards documents. Storage manufacturers quote decimal values and operating systems often report binary ones, which is why a drive sold as 1 TB shows as roughly 931 GB.
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