A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways through the years as newer, better, and faster storage media are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing a logical state. Let's take a brief walk down memory lane to learn about the origins of bits and bytes. Going back in time to Babbage's Analytical Engine, you can see that a bit was stored as the position of a mechanical gear or lever. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. For magnetic storage devices, such as tapes and disks, a bit is represented by the polarity of a certain area of the magnetic film. In modern DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), a bit is often represented as two levels of electrical charge stored in a capacitor, a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field. In June 1956, Werner Buchholz coined the word byte to refer to a group of bits used to encode a single character of text. Let's address character encoding, starting with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII was based on the English alphabet; therefore, every letter, digit, and symbol (a-z, A-Z, 0-9,, -, /, ",!, among others) were represented as a seven-bit integer between 32 and 127. To support other languages, Unicode extended ASCII so that each character is represented as a code-point, or character; for example, a lowercase j is U 006A, where U stands for Unicode followed by a hexadecimal number. UTF-8 is the standard for representing characters as eight bits, allowing every code-point from 0 to 127 to be stored in a single byte. This is fine for English characters, but other languages often have characters that are expressed as two or more bytes.

Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) has remained strong during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the pace of growth moderating only slightly during 2020 and picking up in 2021 and beyond, according to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC). Global revenues for AI software, hardware, and services are expected to total $156.5 billion in 2020, an increase of 12.3% over 2019. "The pandemic has interrupted the momentum of AI services market growth in nearly all regions," said Jennifer Hamel, research manager, Analytics and Intelligent Automation Services. "However, enterprise demand for AI capabilities to support business resiliency and augment human productivity will sustain double-digit expansion in 2020 even as other discretionary projects experience delays." IDC expects AI hardware (server and storage combined) revenues to reach $13.4 billion in 2020, representing 10.3% year-over-year growth, which is a significant moderation from the prior year when it grew 33.4%.