# The Life of a Data Byte

DevFeed: [The Life of a Data Byte](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-life-of-a-data-byte-35206.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/the-life-of-a-data-byte/>)

Published: 2020-03-08T08:09:26Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Jessie Frazelle](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jessie-frazelle.md>)

Topics: [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>), [ASCII](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ascii.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [digital](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/digital.md>)

Tags: [ascii](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ascii.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [digital](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/digital.md>), [encoding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/encoding.md>), [storage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/storage.md>), [unicode](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/unicode.md>)

## AI overview

An overview of how bits and bytes have been stored across historical and modern media, followed by an explanation of character encoding with ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32.

## Source excerpt

A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways as newer, better, and faster mediums of storage are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing logical state. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. If we go even further back in time to Babbage's Analytical Engine, a bit was stored as the position of a mechanical gear or lever. For magnetic storage devices, such as tapes and disks, a bit is represented by the polarity of a certain area of the magnetic film. In modern dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), a bit is often represented as two levels of electrical charge stored in a capacitor, a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field. In June 1956, Werner Buchholz1 coined the word byte2 to refer to a group of bits used to encode a single character of text3. Let's go over a bit about character encoding. We will start with American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. ASCII was based on the English alphabet, therefore every letter, digit, and symbol (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, -, /, ", ! etc) were represented as a 7 bit integer between 32 and 127. This wasn't very friendly to other languages. In order to support other languages, Unicode extended ASCII. With Unicode, each character is represented as a code-point, or character, for example a lower case j is U+006A, where the U stands for Unicode and after that is a hexadecimal number. UTF-8 is the standard for representing characters as eight bits, allowing every code-point between 0-127 to be stored in a single byte. If we think back to ASCII this is fine for English characters, but other language's characters are often expressed as two or more bytes. UTF-16 is the standard for representing characters as 16 bits and UTF-32 is the standard for representing characters as 32 bits. In ASCII eve