http://www.bing.com:80/search?q=8-BitSearch resultshttp://www.bing.com:80/s/a/rsslogo.gifhttp://www.bing.com:80/search?q=8-BitCopyright © 2026 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering Bing results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions.https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/120126/what-is-the-history-of-why-bytes-are-eight-bitsWhat were the historical forces at work, the tradeoffs to make, in deciding to use groups of eight bits as the fundamental unit? There were machines, once upon a time, using other word sizes. But t...Fri, 01 May 2026 13:18:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/176858/is-there-something-special-about-the-number-65535You make too many assuptions: 65535 gives -1 only in 16-bit two's complement arithmetic. It gives -0 in 16-bit one's complement arithmetic and 65535 in 32-bit two's complement and one's complement arithmetics.Sun, 03 May 2026 11:28:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/157816/how-does-it-matter-if-a-character-is-8-bit-or-16-bit-or-32-bit2 Unicode is logically a 21-bit code. As modern computers don’t conveniently work with such units, there are various solutions: use 32 bits (4 bytes), wasting a lot of bits, especially if your data is dominantly in English; use a special scheme that uses one or two 16-bit units per character; and use a variable number of 8-bit bytes per ...Sun, 03 May 2026 11:14:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/178921/how-many-bits-address-is-required-for-a-computer-with-n-bytes-of-memoryYou need log2 (n) bits to address n bytes. For example, you can store 256 different values in an 8 bit number, so 8 bits can address 256 bytes. 2 10 = 1024, so you need 10 bits to address every byte in a kilobyte. Likewise, you need 20 bits to address every byte in a megabyte, and 30 bits to address every byte in a gigabyte. 2 32 = 4294967296, which is the number of bytes in 4 gigabytes, so ...Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:20:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/411128/is-using-64-bit-integers-long-long-faster-than-less-bits-onesC and C++ use 32 bit int because otherwise there is no 32 bit type available (char = 8 bit, short = 16 bit or you have no 16 bit type, int must be 32 bit or you have no 32 bit type). Swift on 64 bit devices has Int = 64 bit, but also has Int8, Int16, Int32 and Int64 so the problem that C has is avoided.Sun, 03 May 2026 14:34:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/239036/how-are-negative-signed-values-storedIn 8-bit signed magnitude, the value 8 is represented as 0 0001000 and -8 as 1 0001000. One's complement. In this representation, negative numbers are created from the corresponding positive number by flipping all the bits and not just the sign bit.Sun, 03 May 2026 09:41:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/441478/memory-alignmentThe missing piece here could be that some instruction sets actually allow you to specify an 8-bit byte address and because of their implementations aligned accesses are better Wikipedia paragraphs: naturally aligned, which generally means that the data's memory address is a multiple of the data * size.Fri, 01 May 2026 04:57:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/434194/the-size-of-a-byte-in-platform-independent-softwareThe fundamental storage unit in the C++ memory model is the byte. A byte is at least large enough to contain any member of the basic execution character set and the eight-bit code units of the Unicode UTF-8 encoding form and is composed of a contiguous sequence of bits, the number of which is implementation- defined.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:47:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/225949/using-unsigned-integers-in-c-and-cEasily bit-shifted from three 8-bit unsigned integers, not so easy with 8-bit signed integers. Or think about algorithms using character lookup tables. If a character is an 8-bit unsigned integer, you can index a lookup table by a character value. However, what do you do if the programming language doesn't support unsigned integers?Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:32:00 GMThttps://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/136774/flipping-the-desired-bit-of-an-integer-numberSuppose you were given an integer number in decimal notation. This when represented in binary will be a series of 0's and 1's. This sequence varies in length with the magnitude of the number. Now s...Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:09:00 GMT