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
Mask (computing) the size of the array; however, it is often faster on many processors to restrict the size of the hash table to powers of two sizes and use a bitmask instead. Mask (computing) In computer science, a mask is data that is used for bitwise operations, particularly in a bit field. Using a mask, multiple bits in a byte, nibble, word etc. can be set either on, off or inverted from on to off (or vice versa) in a single bitwise operation. To turn certain bits on, the bitwise codice_2 operation can be used, following the principle that codice_3 and