Byte: The Word

I would like to get the following on record: The word byte was coined around 1956 to 1957 at MIT Lincoln Laboratories within a project called SAGE (the North American Air Defense System), which was jointly developed by Rand, Lincoln Labs, and IBM. In that era, computer memory structure was already defined in terms of word size. A word consisted of x number of bits; a bit represented a binary notational position in a word. Operations typically operated on all the bits in the full word.

We coined the word byte to refer to a logical set of bits less than a full word size. At that time, it was not defined specifically as x bits but typically referred to as a set of 4 bits, as that was the size of most of our coded data items. Shortly afterward, I went on to other responsibilities that removed me from SAGE. After having spent many years in Asia, I returned to the U.S. and was bemused to find out that the word byte was being used in the new microcomputer technology to refer to the basic addressable memory unit.

Louis G. Dooley
Ocala, FL