Computer number format still split that memory into eight-bit pieces. This is called byte-addressable memory. Historically, many CPUs read data in some multiple of eight bits. Because the byte size of eight bits is so common, but the definition is not standardized, the term octet is sometimes used to explicitly describe an eight bit sequence. A "nibble" (sometimes "nybble"), is a number composed of four bits. Being a half-byte, the nibble was named as a play on words. A person may need several nibbles for one bite from something; similarly, a nybble is a part of a byte. Because four bits allow for
Byte-oriented protocol Byte-oriented protocol Byte-oriented framing protocol is "a communications protocol in which full bytes are used as control codes. Also known as character-oriented protocol." For example UART communication is byte-oriented. The term "character-oriented" is deprecated, since the notion of character has changed. An ASCII character fits to one byte (octet) in terms of the amount of information. With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters (or strictly speaking code points) can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in UTF-8, and other encodings of Unicode use two or four