Bit

The name supposedly comes from "Binary DigIT", not from that thing you put around a horse's mouth. A bit is a single digit number in base-2 (a zero or a one) and is the smallest unit of computer data. A full page of text is typically somewhere around 16,000 bits. The most common area where bits are used intstead of bytes, is to measure bandwidth (in bits-per-second). Why? Probably because it makes your Internet connection sound faster than it really is. Abbreviation: "b".