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
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