Byte of the 8080 and the 8086, used in early personal computers, could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity is often called a nibble, also "nybble", which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit. The term "octet" is used to unambiguously specify a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions. Historically, the term "octad" or "octade" was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin
Byte (magazine) Byte (magazine) Byte was an American microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. Whereas many magazines from the mid-1980s had been dedicated to the MS-DOS (PC) platform or the Mac, mostly from a business or home user's perspective, "Byte" covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software", and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputers and high-reliability computing. Coverage was in-depth with much technical detail, rather than user-oriented. "Byte" started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics