What are Bits and Bytes

Bits and bytes, we are forever hearing about them. We now hear even more about their big brothers kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. But let us look at the humble bit as without it computers would not even work.

The computer “bit” is part of the binary numbering system. In other words it has only two numbers one and zero. This is the basis of computing where they can indicate “true” or “false” this concept being used in logic gates. Now I am starting to run off at the mouth so I will stop here and get back to what bits and bytes mean to you.

A byte comprises of eight bits each bit capable of being “0″ or “1″. In the binary numbering system as you progress from right to left each position is double the previous position. So if we look at the following byte 11111111 this goes this way

00000001 = 1
00000010 = 2
00000100 = 4
00001000 = 8
00010000 = 16
00100000 = 32
01000000 = 64
10000000 = 128

So if we add these up in decimal this comes to 256 so a full byte has 256 combinations. This means more to us than “logic gates” because we can now use these 256 combination’s to mean something. For example we can use 26 of them to represent each letter of the alphabet. We can use 10 of then to indicate the 0 to 9. This still leaves heaps to indicate other things.

We may now see why the byte is so important. If the “bit” is the basic true or false of the technical innards of a computer the byte is the information “innards” of it.

The usual international deciders, (commissions or something) has allocated certain binary numbers to equal an alphabetic character.

For example the word “howdy” is represented by the numbers:

01101110 (104 decimal) = h
01101111 (111 decimal) = o
01110111 (119 decimal) = w
01100101 (101 decimal) = d
01111001 (121 decimal) = y

If capitals were used there would be a different set of numbers.

So there you are that how the computer get the information to your display.

Now we have kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. As we know kilo, mega and giga are part of the decimal system and are only used to represent the quantity of eight bit bytes.

Using the decimal system is not strictly correct but is used for convenience as kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes actually indicate:

1,024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
1,024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte (MB)
1,024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte (GB)

So there you are you now know all you probably need to understand what bits and bytes are.