The byte (/ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 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.NET programming languages, such as C#, define both an unsigned byte and a signed sbyte, holding values from 0 to 255, and -128 to 127, respectively. In data transmission systems, the byte is defined as a contiguous sequence of bits in a serial data stream, representing is the smallest distinguished unit of data.