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
Packed pixel Packed pixel In packed pixel or chunky framebuffer organization, the bits defining each pixel are grouped together. For example, if there are 16 bits per pixel, each pixel is represented in two consecutive (contiguous) 8-bit bytes in the framebuffer (a.k.a. screen buffer). If there are 4 bits per pixel (16 colors), each frame buffer byte defines two pixels, one in each nibble. The latter example is as opposed to storing perhaps half of the bits—2 bits—for each of four pixels in one byte and the other two bits for each of those four pixels in another byte or bytes. It