Bits to Bytes (bit to B)
1 bit equals 0.125 bytes exactly.
How to convert bits to bytes
To convert bits to bytes, multiply the number of bits by 0.125. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bytes by 8.
bytes = bits × 0.125
Example: 10 bits = 1.25 bytes.
Decimal prefixes (kB, MB, GB) are powers of 1,000; binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) are powers of 1,024. Storage makers use decimal; Windows reports binary but labels it GB.
About these units
Bit (bit)
The smallest unit of digital information: a single 0 or 1. Eight bits make a byte.
Bit is short for binary digit, and the word was coined by John W. Tukey. He shortened the phrase in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon first used it in print in his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication and credited Tukey with the word. The idea predates the name: Ralph Hartley proposed a logarithmic measure of information in 1928, and punched cards, invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon in 1732 and developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, already stored one bit per hole position.
A bit holds one of two values, written 0 or 1, and everything digital is built from them. Eight bits make a byte, so a bit is one eighth of a byte. Symbols for the unit are not settled: the IEC standard uses bit, while IEEE 1541-2002 recommends a lowercase b, with uppercase B reserved for the byte. The difference matters because internet speeds and file sizes are quoted in different units.
1 bit = 0.125 bytes (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
Byte (B)
Eight bits. The basic addressable unit of memory and storage.
Werner Buchholz coined the word byte in June 1956 while working on the IBM Stretch computer; the earliest supporting document is dated 11 June 1956. He respelled bite on purpose, in his words to avoid accidental mutation to bit. At that stage a byte was any group of one to six bits, and a move to eight bits was considered in August 1956 and built into the design soon after. Louis Dooley later claimed he had coined the term around 1956 or 1957 on the SAGE project at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where it meant groups of four bits, but Fred Brooks credited Buchholz.
IBM's System/360 adopted the eight-bit byte, and its success made that size the standard. The symbol is a capital B, and the unambiguous alternative is octet, a word used in protocol standards such as RFC 791. A byte can hold 256 distinct values, enough for a letter of the alphabet in a simple character set, which is why files and memory addresses are counted in bytes.
The byte is the reference unit for digital storage on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Binary prefix
Related conversions
- Bytes to bits (reverse)
- Bits to kilobytes
- Bits to megabytes
- Bits to gigabytes
- Bits to terabytes
- Bits to petabytes
- Bits to kibibytes
- Bits to mebibytes
- Bits to gibibytes
- Bits to tebibytes
- Bits to kilobits
- Bits to megabits
- Bits to gigabits
- Kilobytes to bytes
- Megabytes to bytes
- Gigabytes to bytes
- Terabytes to bytes
- Petabytes to bytes
- Kibibytes to bytes
- Mebibytes to bytes
- Gibibytes to bytes
- Tebibytes to bytes
- Kilobits to bytes
- Megabits to bytes
- Gigabits to bytes
See all digital storage units.