The Byte is a fundamental unit of digital information that consists of 8 bits. Since each bit can have two states (0 or 1), a byte can represent 28, or 256, different values (from 0 to 255). This is a convenient size for representing a single character using encoding standards like ASCII. For example, in ASCII, the byte 01000001 represents the uppercase letter 'A'. The byte is the basic addressable unit of memory in most computer architectures, meaning that each byte in memory has a unique address. Larger units of information are expressed as multiples of a byte. However, there can be ambiguity in the prefixes.
In networking and storage, SI prefixes (powers of 10) are often used: a kilobyte (kB) is 1000 bytes, a megabyte (MB) is 1,000,000 bytes. In the context of computer memory and operating systems, binary prefixes (powers of 2) are traditionally used: a kibibyte (KiB) is 210 or 1024 bytes, and a mebibyte (MiB) is 220 or 1,048,576 bytes. Despite the formal distinction, "kilobyte" and "KB" are still commonly used to mean 1024 bytes. In programming and instrument control, data is often handled in bytes.
For example, a 32-bit floating-point number, used for precise measurements, occupies 4 bytes of memory. When sending data over a communication interface, the total amount of data transferred is measured in bytes, and the size of communication buffers is also specified in bytes.
1 MB = 1024 KB
1 GB = 1024 MB
1 TB = 1024 GB