ASCII 56 — 8

Eight corresponds to one byte (8 bits), the fundamental addressable unit of digital storage and data transfer in modern computing. A single byte can represent 256 distinct values (0–255) and is the building block for all larger data measurements — kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and beyond. Octal notation (base-8) was historically popular because each octal digit maps cleanly to exactly 3 binary digits. UTF-8, the web's dominant character encoding, derives its name from its 8-bit code unit size.

The ten decimal digit characters (0–9) occupy consecutive ASCII codes 48 through 57, arranged sequentially by deliberate design. This placement enables the classic parsing technique of subtracting the character '0' (code 48) from any digit character to yield its integer value — a trick embedded in virtually every text processing system and parser written in the past six decades. Digit characters are fundamentally distinct from numeric values: the character '5' is stored as byte value 53, not the integer 5.

In the ASCII encoding table, Digit 8 is assigned code point 56 in decimal (0x38 hexadecimal, 070 octal, 00111000 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Digit 8 works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.