system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there a reason why 8 bits make up 1 byte?
gpt
A byte hasn't always consisted of 8 bits, it is hardware dependent, and so there have been implementations 4,5,6 and 7 bits in a byte.  It was just how those implementers decided to represent that information.  For example, ASCII is transmitted at 7 bits to the byte and hardware that made use of ASCII would have to follow this standard.  It was when AT&T started using 8 bits that it became popular, because that infrastructure was everywhere.

Soon, everyone started using it, and now you see almost all hardware using 8 bits to the byte.  There isn't a standard that says how many bits there should be to the byte, it's just the most commonly used one.