Definition
Plain language
A small unit of computer data — roughly one letter of text.
As stated in the literature
Eight bits; the standard addressable unit of storage, and the granularity at which files are compared for exact equality.
Also called: bytes
Why it matters: Comparing files byte by byte is the strictest way to confirm two things are truly identical rather than just similar-looking.
For example, the word "cat" stored as plain text takes up three bytes, one for each letter.
Heard on the show
“Inside the linker, there's a function with a memcpy — that copies some number of bytes from one buffer to another.”Episode 014 — Why a Constrained Pipeline Beat a Full Coding Agent at Finding Bugs 30-to-1