| Just as a word is made up of letters, a byte is made up of bits. While words have a variable number of letters, all bytes have eight bits. A bit represents a positive or negative electric charge. The computer interprets these electric states as either the digits 0 (negative charge) or 1 (positive charge). These are the only two digits the computer can understand. Because of this, computers work on a binary number system, instead of the decimal system we are used to. The word bit stands for binary digit. The computer interprets the negative and positive electric charges as binary digits (bits), and groups eight bits together. The sequence of the eight 1s and 0s identifies one byte from another. There are 256 different possible 0-1 combinations the eight bits can make (2 to the power of 8 = 256), and so a computer can identify 256 different characters. This is a sufficient number to represent all of the uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet, the digits 0-9, all the punctuation marks, a symbol used by the computer for a space, special characters such a * and I, other symbols used specifically by the computer, and still leave plenty of possible symbols for future uses. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8 bits = 1 byte | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (K) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1,024 kilobytes - 1 megabyte (MB) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (GB) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte (TB) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| kilo- k 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024 mega- M 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576 giga- G 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 tera- T 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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