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
Byte addressing be achieved in one instruction: store this character code at that byte address. Text programs are easier to write, smaller, and run faster. The advantage of word addressing is that more memory can be addressed in the same number of bits. The IBM 7094 has 15-bit addresses, so could address 32,768 words of 36 bits. The machines were often built with a full complement of addressable memory. Addressing 32,768 bytes of 6 bits would have been much less useful for scientific and engineering users. Or consider the 32-bit Pentium processor. Its 32-bit address bus can address 4 billion different items.