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What Is a Bit, and How Does a Series of Bits Represent Data? Most computers are digital and recognize only two discrete states: off and on

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What Is a Bit, and How Does a Series of Bits Represent Data? Most computers are digital and recognize only two discrete states: off and on. To represent these states, computers use the binary system, which is a number system that has just two unique digits — 0 (for off ) and 1 (for on) — called bits. A bit (short for binary digit), is the smallest unit of data a computer can process. Grouped together as a unit, 8 bits form a byte, which provides enough different combinations of 0s and 1s to represent 256 individual characters. The combinations are defined by patterns, called coding schemes, such as ASCII and Unicode.