Nibble

In computing, a nibble,[1] or spelled nybble to match byte, is a unit of information that is an aggregation of four-bits; half of a byte/octet.

Four-bit computers use nibble-sized data for storage and operations; as the word unit.

[4] In 2014, David B. Benson, a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembered that he playfully used (and may have possibly coined) the term nibble as "half a byte" and unit of storage required to hold a binary-coded decimal (BCD) digit around 1958, when talking to a programmer from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

Another early recorded use of the term nybble was in 1977 within the consumer-banking technology group at Citibank.

On the Apple II, much of the disk drive control and group-coded recording was implemented in software.

Today, the terms byte and nibble almost always refer to 8-bit and 4-bit collections respectively and are very rarely used to express any other sizes.