The story
An alteration of the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. Coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM 7030 Stretch computer.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
byte
Today it means: A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word. Full definition →