Byte explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of "bite" to avoid accidental mutation to "bit". Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term
Byte order mark as a byte sequence in various encodings and how those sequences might appear in a text editor that is interpreting each byte as a legacy encoding (CP1252 and caret notation for the C0 controls): Byte order mark The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise