The term was first used in 1946 by John Tukey, a leading statistician and adviser to five presidents.
More meaningful information is obtained by combining consecutive bits into larger units.
On almost all modern computers , a byte is equal to 8 bits . A disk that can hold 1.44 megabytes, for example, is capable of storing approximately 1.4 million characters, or about 3,000 pages of information. The term is most often used to describe monitors , printers , and bit-mapped graphic images. In the case of dot-matrix and laser printers , the resolution indicates the number of dots per inch . This translates into different dpi measurements depending on the size of the screen.