Digital information is stored in a computer as binary digits (or bits), each can have of 0 or 1. A byte is a group of 8 bits. Each byte can have 256 (i.e.2) different values. This is sufficient for storing an ASCII code representing a letter or other symbol. however, to store numbers larger than 255 it is necessary to group several bytes together. These groups (often of 4 bytes ) are sometimes referred to as a word.