8 bits make one byte. And a million
bytes make... a megabyte! So, when you check your computer for memory,
and you see you have 64 MB of RAM, you know you have 64 million bytes of
memory space. Or that your hard drive, which is described in Gigabytes,
has TONS of room on it.
Unless, of course, you have an older computer
with a small hard drive. Standard sizes today are from 8 gigabytes to 80
gigabytes. There are smaller and larger drives as well.
One gigabyte holds a thousand megabytes.
And one megabyte holds a million bytes. Once you know the prefixes, the
rest is easy. Here's a prefix list for you:
Kilo=one thousand of anything
Mega=one million of anything
Giga=one billion of anything
Those are the 'big three' in the personal
computing arena. When you see that a download is "3 megabytes" in size,
you know it's just a BB in a box car. The box car is your hard drive, and
that 3 megabyte file is the bb. Or ball bearing.
Do you have your bearings now? I think
I'm getting punch drunk!
Computers started out very, very small.
Early Tandy 1000SX's had NO hard drive. It had 384 K of RAM. If you doubled
that to 640K or RAM it was maxed out. It also had two big floppy disk drives.
Then along came consumer affordable hard
drives. 20 megabytes! That was a monster. (There was no Windows at this
time.)
Sizes kept going up and up and up... and
prices kept going down. That was cool. Imagine what it was like to
move from a basic DOS system like the Tandy to a wonderful picture window
system like, well, Windows. It was like going from a horse and buggy to
a horseless carriage.
Yea, it was great.
So, we're looking at sizes... and know
that most things are measured in megabytes and gigabytes. The common thing
is the byte. Let's ramble just a tad more...
Computers work with electricity, right?
And they store stuff in memory and on your hard drive. If it's in memory
(RAM) then the storage is actually an electrical current being ON or OFF.
If it's ON, it's given the number '1'.
If it's OFF, it's given the number '0'. This is also called the binary
number system. Ones and zeros. That's all you get. You have to be
able to count to any number using only ones and zeros.
Computers can only use ones and zeros.
They have to do
everything that way, and the electrical
currents are either on or off. Without going into the mysteries of electrical
engineering, (hey, this is supposed to be Newbie-Speak, not Geek-Speak!)
let's leave it at that.
The point: binary digits is what we're
speaking about.Binary... Digits... shorten that to... Bit. See the relationship?
A 'bit' is a Binary Digit. Take the 'B' from Binary and the 'it' from Digit
and make a new word.
So, now you know. One bit is a zero or
a one. It takes 8 of those zeros and ones to make a byte. Here's a byte:
01101001
And one byte equals one character you type
on your keyboard. This newsletter has LOTS of characters. Let's say it
has a thousand characters just for fun. That's 1,000 bytes worth of characters.
Computer
Tips
