what is a byte

The computer word of the day is BYTE

So what is a BYTE? You may have seen the words Megabyte and Gigabyte.

When the computer is talking to itself, the letter 'A' looks like this: 01000001

When you press the keyboard for a capital 'A', the keyboard sends 01000001 to the inside of the computer.

If you press the lowercase 'a', the keyboard sends 01100001

So look at these side by side: 01000001 and 01100001

They are not the same.

The number of 1s and 0s is 8. This is a BYTE.

Here is how the computer counts from 1 to 5 in BYTES:

1  →  00000001  
2  →  00000010  
3  →  00000011  
4  →  00000100  
5  →  00000101

One million of these is a Megabyte.
One billion of these is a Gigabyte.