Computer number format with a specific number of bits are used to represent varying things and have specific names. A "byte" is a bit string containing the number of bits needed to represent a character. On most modern computers, this is an eight bit string. Because the definition of a byte is related to the number of bits composing a character, some older computers have used a different bit length for their byte. In many computer architectures, the byte is used to address specific areas of memory. For example, even though 64-bit processors may address memory sixty-four bits at a time, they may
Byte-oriented protocol Byte-oriented protocol Byte-oriented framing protocol is "a communications protocol in which full bytes are used as control codes. Also known as character-oriented protocol." For example UART communication is byte-oriented. The term "character-oriented" is deprecated, since the notion of character has changed. An ASCII character fits to one byte (octet) in terms of the amount of information. With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters (or strictly speaking code points) can be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in UTF-8, and other encodings of Unicode use two or four