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Software developers and system designers widely use hexadecimal numbers because they provide a convenient representation of binary-coded values. Each hexadecimal digit represents four bits (binary digits), also known as a nibble (or nybble). [1] For example, an 8-bit byte is two hexadecimal digits and its value can be written as 00 to FF in ...
Similarly, the most significant bit (MSb) represents the highest-order place of the binary integer. The LSb is sometimes referred to as the low-order bit or right-most bit, due to the convention in positional notation of writing less significant digits further to the right. The MSb is similarly referred to as the high-order bit or left-most bit.
The upper four bits, called the "zone" bits, are usually set to a fixed value so that the byte holds a character value corresponding to the digit. EBCDIC systems use a zone value of 1111 (hex F); this yields bytes in the range F0 to F9 (hex), which are the EBCDIC codes for the characters "0" through "9".
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. [2]
The term nibble originates from its representing "half a byte", with byte a homophone of the English word bite. [4] In 2014, David B. Benson, a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembered that he playfully used (and may have possibly coined) the term nibble as "half a byte" and unit of storage required to hold a binary-coded decimal (BCD) digit around 1958, when talking to a ...
For communication throughput, a base unit of bit is common. For example, using the metric kilo prefix, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes and a kilobit is 1000 bits. Use of metric prefixes is common, but often inaccurate since binary storage hardware is organized with capacity that is a power of 2 – not 10 as the metric prefixes are.
The base-2 numeral system is a positional notation with a radix of 2.Each digit is referred to as a bit, or binary digit.Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used by almost all modern computers and computer-based devices, as a preferred system of use, over various other human techniques of communication, because ...
4 bits – (a.k.a. tetrad(e), nibble, quadbit, semioctet, or halfbyte) the size of a hexadecimal digit; decimal digits in binary-coded decimal form 5 bits – the size of code points in the Baudot code , used in telex communication (a.k.a. pentad )