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
Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm just adds the distance to the front even if already present in the list and SHORTREP and LONGREP[0] don't alter the list. The length is encoded as follows:<br> As in LZ77, the length is not limited by the distance, because copying from the dictionary is defined as if the copy was performed byte by byte, keeping the distance constant. Distances are logically 32-bit and distance 0 points to the most recently added byte in the dictionary. The distance encoding starts with a 6-bit "distance slot", which determines how many further bits are needed. Distances are decoded as a binary concatenation