Byte Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size – byte-sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. Early character encoding systems often used six bits, and machines
LEB128 single byte 0x00. As an example, here is how the unsigned number 624485 gets encoded: Unsigned LEB128 and VLQ (variable-length quantity) both compress any given integer into not only the same number of bits, but exactly the same bits—the two formats differ only in exactly how those bits are arranged. A signed number is represented similarly, except that the two's complement number is sign extended up to a multiple of 7 bits (ensuring that the most significant bit is zero for a positive number and one for a negative number). Then the number is broken into groups as for the