Why does the letter a take up one byte of storage space?

The letter "a" takes up one byte of storage space because it is represented using the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encoding system, which assigns a unique integer value to each character. In ASCII, the letter "a" corresponds to the decimal value 97, which fits within a single byte (8 bits). This allows for 256 possible values in a byte, accommodating all standard ASCII characters, including letters, digits, and punctuation. Therefore, storing the letter "a" requires just one byte.