Davidson, Shelby J. (born: 1868 - died: 1931) Born in Lexington, Davidson became a lawyer. He invented a paper rewinding device for a tabulating machine and an adding machine attachment for automatically adding in set amounts. Shelby Davidson's Papers are at Howard University. For more see World of Invention. History's most significant inventions and the people behind them, 2nd ed., by K. A. McGrath and B. Travers.
Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same code values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters.
8 bits are known as a byte, and it is bytes which are used to pass our information in it's basic form - characters. An alphanumeric character (e.g. a letter or number such as 'A', 'B' or '7') is stored as 1 byte. For example, to store the letter 'R' uses 1 byte, which is stored by the computer as 8 bits, '01010010'. A document containing 100 characters would use 100 bytes (800 bits) - assuming the file didn't have any overhead (additional data about the file which forms part of the file).