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Bits & Bytes and Whole Lot More

Computer jargon is like modern day graffiti—it’s everywhere you go. If you're not familiar with those technical terms, I'm afraid you'll be considered a XXIst century illiterate.

For example, if you have used a computer for more than five minutes, then you have absolutely heard the words “bits” and “bytes” several times. You might also have read a newspaper ad that says, “This computer has a 32-bit Pentium processor with 512 megabytes of RAM and 120 gigabytes of hard disk space.”

How do you digest this ubiquitous computer language which is increasingly invading the English language? The only way I know, is go and study the basics and grow from there. This is what I found out.

A bit is a binary digit or unit, taking a value of either 0 or 1. That’s why it’s called binary, meaning two. Binary digits are a basic unit of information storage and communication in digital computing and digital information theory.

A bit of storage is like a light switch; it can be either on (1) or off (0). A single bit is a one or a zero, a true or a false, a “flag” which is “on” or “off”, or in general, the quantity of information required to distinguish two mutually exclusive equally probable states from each other. Gregory Bateson defined a bit as “a difference that makes a difference”.

Claude E. Shannon first used the word bit in his 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted “binary digit” to simply “bit”.

On the other hand, the computer term byte (pronounced “bite”), is a unit of measurement of information storage, most often consisting of eight bits. 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.

The term byte was coined by Dr. Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. The term “byte” comes from “bite,” as in the smallest amount of data a computer could “bite” at once. The spelling change not only reduced the chance of a “bite” being mistaken for a “bit,” but also was consistent with the penchant of early computer scientists to make up words and change spellings.

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).

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 mean 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.

To give you another perspective of what these computer terms mean, the following list will provide you with the Information Object and how many bytes each one contains. Much of the information is derived from figures calculated by Roy Williams on his page called “Powers of Ten.” Although his page has expired, another version derived in part from it is located at the University of California at Berkeley. Here we go.

1. A binary decision: one bit (0 or 1)
2. A single text character: one byte
3. A typical text word: 10 bytes
4. A typewritten page: 2 kilobytes (KBs)
5. A low-resolution photograph: 100 kilobytes
6. A short novel: 1 megabyte (MB)
7. The contents of a 3.5 floppy disk: 1.44 megabytes
8. A high-resolution photograph: 2 megabytes
9. The complete works of Shakespeare: 5 megabytes
10. A minute of high-fidelity sound: 10 megabytes
11. One meter (or close to a yard) of shelved books: 100 megabytes
12. The contents of a CD-ROM: 500 megabytes
13. A pickup truck filled with books: 1 gigabyte (GB)
14. The contents of a DVD: 17 gigabytes
15. A collection of the works of Beethoven: 20 gigabytes
16. A library floor of academic journals: 100 gigabytes
17. 50,000 trees made into paper and printed: 1 terabyte (TB)
18. An academic research library: 2 terabytes
19. The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress: 10 terabytes
20. The National Climactic Data Center database: 400 terabytes
21. All U.S. academic research libraries: 2 petabytes
22. All hard disk capacity developed in 1995: 20 petabytes
23. All printed material in the world: 200 petabytes
24. Total volume of information generated in 1999: 2 exabytes (EBs)
25. All words ever spoken by human beings: 5 exabytes

After reading this post, you can boldly walk to your boss and/or college professor and let him (them) know you also know your techie stuff. Good Day!