Individual bits only offer two options, so they’re not particularly useful, but when you string eight of them together (into a byte), you can have 256 different combinations (2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2). That’s enough to assign a different sequence to every letter of the alphabet (both upper- and lowercase), the ten digits from 0 to 9, spaces between words, and other symbols such as punctuation marks and many letters used in foreign alphabets