Byte Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size – byte-sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. Early character encoding systems often used six bits, and machines
Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing end of the packet. There are two equivalent ways to describe the COBS encoding process: These examples show how various data sequences would be encoded by the COBS algorithm. In the examples, all bytes are expressed as hexadecimal values, and encoded data is shown with text formatting to illustrate various features: Below is a diagram using example 3 from above table, to illustrate how each modified data byte is located, and how it is identified as a data byte or an end of frame byte. Examples 7 through 10 show how the overhead varies depending on the data being encoded