A collection of eight bits is called __________.
A collection of eight bits is called Byte.
Somebody made a joke about a group carrying a byte of the data, and the term stuck. Sometimes you hear a group of four bits called a nibble. The largest number you can represent with 8 bits is 11111111, or 255 in decimal notation. Since 00000000 is the smallest, you can represent 256 things with a byte.
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer[1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.