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
SEX (computing) SEX (computing) In computing, the SEX assembly language mnemonic has often been used for the "codice_1" machine instruction found in the Motorola 6809. A computer's or CPU's "sex" can also mean the endianness of the computer architecture used. x86 computers do not have the same "byte sex" as HC11 computers, for example. Functions are sometimes needed for computers of different endianness to communicate with each other over the internet, as protocols often use big endian byte coding by default. On the RCA 1802 series of microprocessors, the SEX, for "codice_2," instruction is used to designate which of the machine's sixteen