Why is 1 Byte equal to 8 Bits? [closed]

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Closed 3 years ago.

Why not 4 bits, or 16 bits?

I assume some hardware-related reasons and I'd like to know how 8bit 1byte became the standard.

回答1:

I'ts been a minute since I took computer organization, but the relevant wiki on 'Byte' gives some context.

The byte was originally the smallest number of bits that could hold a single character (I assume standard ASCII). We still use ASCII standard, so 8 bits per character is still relevant. This sentence, for instance, is 41 bytes. That's easily countable and practical for our purposes.

If we had only 4 bits, there would only be 16 (2^4) possible characters, unless we used 2 bytes to represent a single character, which is more inefficient computationally. If we had 16 bits in a byte, we would have a whole lot more 'dead space' in our instruction set, we would allow 65,536 (2^16) possible characters, which would make computers run less efficiently when performing byte-level instructions, especially since our character set is much smaller.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42842662/why-is-1-byte-equal-to-8-bits