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
Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing end of the packet. There are two equivalent ways to describe the COBS encoding process: These examples show how various data sequences would be encoded by the COBS algorithm. In the examples, all bytes are expressed as hexadecimal values, and encoded data is shown with text formatting to illustrate various features: Below is a diagram using example 3 from above table, to illustrate how each modified data byte is located, and how it is identified as a data byte or an end of frame byte. Examples 7 through 10 show how the overhead varies depending on the data being encoded