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
LEB128 single byte 0x00. As an example, here is how the unsigned number 624485 gets encoded: Unsigned LEB128 and VLQ (variable-length quantity) both compress any given integer into not only the same number of bits, but exactly the same bits—the two formats differ only in exactly how those bits are arranged. A signed number is represented similarly, except that the two's complement number is sign extended up to a multiple of 7 bits (ensuring that the most significant bit is zero for a positive number and one for a negative number). Then the number is broken into groups as for the