Byte addressing Byte addressing Byte addressing refers to hardware architectures which support accessing individual bytes of data rather than only larger units called words, which would be "word-addressable". Such computers are sometimes called "byte machines" (in contrast to "word machines"). The basic unit of digital storage is called a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common architectures can address more than 8 bits of data at a time. For example, the Intel 386SX processor can handle 16-bit (two-byte) data, since data is transferred over a 16-bit bus. However, data in memory may be of various lengths. A 64-bit architecture machine
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