What unit of storage is used to represent a character?

Answer 1

This has been called different things and had different sizes in terms of number of bits over the history of computers.

In the early days of computers it was usually simply called a character and was either 5 or 6 bits long depending on the computer (6 bits being the most common). On business computers memory was composed of individual characters that were independently addressable. On scientific computers memory was usually composed of words (typically 36, 40, or 60 bits wide) and several characters were stored per word. These characters in a word were sometimes called characters, sometimes called part words, sometimes called parcels, sometimes called other things. Many different incompatible character codes were also used (even within the same company's computers).

Following IBM's introduction of their System 360 the word byte was introduced to refer to an 8 bit wide independently addressable memory location that could be used to store a character in either 8 bit EBCDIC or 7 bit ASCII codes (or very small integer values, logical values, etc.).