Why 1 byte = 8 bits?

There are two stories. First, when it was time punch card (hole card). Second, when the first emergence of technology-based 8-bit processor.
The first story. Punch cards are the latest technology capable of handling a number of characters to 64 characters where each character is encoded in the order of 8 combinations of holes. IBM, as the producer of punch card machines, called the combination of 8 holes TSB to 'byte' is said to convey the 'octet'. Nevertheless, the combination is not in ASCII format because it is true there is no standardization of ASCII.
The second story, a continuation of the first story. Punch card technology was later developed into a processor technology that it was only able to work in a combination of 8 binary digits. Then adopted a combination of 8 hole punch card into the 8 digit binary 'strengthen' the term 'byte'.
Thus, finally 'byte' is then used as a set of 8 binary digits. So that although the technology develops processor to be able to work in a 16-digit, still referred to as 2 bytes.
Then, simply add the information. There are two types, namely singlecode character and unicode character. Limitations standards recognize only ASCII characters 256 number is no longer sufficient for the development of an increasingly global. At first, this is overcome by developing character encoding, which maps to a particular wilayah2 256 characters. For example, in Asia the 60th character is 'A', but in Europe the 60th character is 'Ã €'. But this is a problem when writing Europe (the European encoding) would be read in Asia (Asia encoding) because writing was a mess. Because it is developing a new standard called Unicode character in which one character is no longer represented by 1 byte, 2 bytes instead.