bit
loreprogramming
Stands for: binary digit
The smallest unit of information, a single choice between 0 and 1, and the atom on which the entire digital world is built.
The word is a contraction of 'binary digit', coined by John Tukey in a Bell Labs memo dated January 9, 1947. His colleague Claude Shannon gave it its enduring meaning in 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' (1948), the paper that founded information theory and was the first to put 'bit' in print, crediting Tukey. Shannon's insight was that any message, from text to a photograph to a song, could be measured and transmitted as a number of bits, decoupling information from whatever physical medium carries it. Everything downstream, bytes and files and protocols, follows from that one idea.
Also known as: binary digit