If you have used a computer for more than five minutes, you have heard the words bits and bytes. Both RAM and hard disk capacities are measured in bytes, as are file sizes when you examine them in a file viewer.
You might hear an advertisement that says, "This computer has a 32-bit Pentium processor with 64 megabytes of RAM and 2.1 gigabytes of hard disk space." In this article we will discuss the units of measurement commonly used in computer systems from bits to BrontoBytes.
 
 
Bits
Computers happen to operate using the base-2 number system, also known as the binary number system (just like the base-10 number system is known as the decimal number system). The reason computers use the base-2 system is because it makes it a lot easier to implement them with current electronic technology. You could wire up and build computers that operate in base-10, but they would be fiendishly expensive right now. On the other hand, base-2 computers are relatively cheap.

So computers use binary numbers, and therefore use binary digits in place of decimal digits. The word bit is a shortening of the words "Binary digit." Whereas decimal digits have 10 possible values ranging from 0 to 9, bits have only two possible values: 0 and 1. Therefore, a binary number is composed of only 0s and 1s, like this: 1011. How do you figure out what the value of the binary number 1011 is? You do it in the same way you figure out a decimal number except you can’t count above 1.  This numbering system uses the base of 2 instead of a base of 10.  

Instead of the columns being ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.; the columns are now ones, twos, fours, eights, sixteens, etc. So therefore the number 1011 is converted to decimal using the following calculation:
(1 * 2^3) + (0 * 2^2) + (1 * 2^1) + (1 * 2^0) = 8 + 0 + 2 + 1 = 11

You can see that in binary numbers, each bit holds the value of increasing powers of 2. That makes counting in binary pretty easy. Starting at zero and going through 8, counting in decimal and binary looks like this:

0 =     0
1 =     1
2 =    10
3 =    11
4 =   100
5 =   101
6 =   110
7 =   111
8 =  1000

When you look at this sequence, 0 and 1 are the same for decimal and binary number systems. At the number 2, you see carrying first take place in the binary system. If a bit is 1, and you add 1 to it, the bit becomes 0 and the next bit becomes 1.  When you add 1 more bit to the number 111, it becomes 1000.

Bytes
Bits are rarely seen alone in computers. They are almost always bundled together into 8-bit collections, and these collections are called bytes. Why are there 8 bits in a byte? A similar question is, "Why are there 12 eggs in a dozen?" The 8-bit byte is something that people settled on through trial and error over the past 50 years. I think this was actually popularized by IBM.  It just makes it easier for us people to read computer information.

With 8 bits in a byte, you can represent 256 values ranging from 0 to 255, as shown here:

0 = 00000000
1 = 00000001
2 = 00000010
   ...
254 = 11111110
255 = 11111111

Not only can you represent numbers, you can also represent the alphabet and many special characters.
 
Bytes: ASCII
Bytes are frequently used to hold individual characters in a text document. In the ASCII character set, each binary value between 0 and 127 is given a specific character. ASCII is a standard format set used by computers.  Most computers extend the ASCII character set to use the full range of 256 characters available in a byte. The upper 128 characters handle special things like accented characters from common foreign languages.

Computers store text documents, both on disk and in memory, using these codes. Try this experiment: Open up a new file in Notepad and insert the sentence, "Four score and seven years ago" in it. Save the file to disk under the name getty.txt. Then use the explorer and look at the size of the file. You will find that the file has a size of 30 bytes on disk: 1 byte for each character. If you add another word to the end of the sentence and re-save it, the file size will jump to the appropriate number of bytes. Each character consumes a byte.

Lots of Bytes
When you start talking about lots of bytes, you get into prefixes like kilo, mega and giga, as in kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte (also shortened to K, M and G, as in Kbytes, Mbytes and Gbytes or KB, MB and GB). The following table shows the multipliers:
 
You can see in this chart that kilo is about a thousand, mega is about a million, giga is about a billion, and so on. So when someone says, "This computer has a 2 gig hard drive," what he or she means is that the hard drive stores 2 gigabytes, or approximately 2 billion bytes, or exactly 2,147,483,648 bytes. How could you possibly need 2 gigabytes of space? When you consider that one CD holds 650 megabytes, you can see that just three CDs worth of data will fill the whole thing! Terabyte databases are fairly common these days, and there are probably a few petabyte databases floating around the Pentagon by now. Nowadays it's not uncommon to have hundreds or thousands of CD discs, and you can even store all these discs in one large storage device like the the Kintronics CD/DVD Servers.  They can hold thousands of discs in TeraBytes of storage.

How long would it take someone to download a one- yottabyte file using a 28.8 baud modem? 11 trillion years.

 
Quick Recap
To sum up this entire article, here's what we've learned about bits and bytes:

• Bits are binary digits. A bit can hold the value 0 or 1.
• Bytes are made up of 8 bits each.
• Binary math works just like decimal math, but each bit can have a value of only 0 or 1.

There really is nothing more to it -- bits and bytes are that simple!

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