What Happened on October 24th

Werner Buchholz was a member of the teams that designed the IBM 701 and Stretch models. Buchholz used the term "byte" to describe a sequence of eight bits—although in the 1950s, when the term first was used, equipment used six-bit chunks of information, and a byte equaled six bits. Buchholz described a byte as the group of bits required to encode a character, or the numbers of bits transmitted in parallel in a communications channel.