A bit, short for binary digit, is the smallest unit of measurement used for information storage in computers. A bit is represented by a 1 or a 0 with a value of true or false, sometimes expressed as on or off. Eight bits form a single byte of information, also known as an octet. Thus, the difference between a bit and a byte is size, or the amount of information stored.<\/p>\n
It takes eight bits (1 byte) to store a single character. The capital letter \u201cA\u201d is expressed digitally as 01000001. A small case \u201ca\u201d is represented in binary code as 01100001. Notice the third bit is different in each octet. By rearranging the bits within the octet, a byte is capable of producing 256 unique combinations to form letters, numbers, special characters and symbols.<\/p>\n
It can get confusing keeping units of storage straight, but if you have trouble remembering which is a bit and a byte, note that the smaller word is the smaller unit of storage. Once the difference between aaa bit and a byte is understood, this helps to remember the difference between greater units such as the kilobit and kilobyte.<\/p>\n
A kilobit is 1000 bits, though in the binary system it is designated as 1024 bits due to the amount of space required to store a kilobit using common operating systems and storage types. But, you can think of kilo as referring to 1000 to more easily remember what a kilobit is. A kilobyte would be 1000 bytes. But actually it\u2019s 1024 bytes see?<\/p>\n
Here are the number of bytes in some commonly used terms:<\/p>\n
Kilobyte 1024 bytes<\/p>\n
Megabyte\u00a01,048,576 bytes<\/p>\n
Gigabyte\u00a01,073, 741, 824 bytes<\/p>\n
Terabtye\u00a01,099,511,627,776 bytes<\/p>\n
To put things in perspective: The King James Version of The Holy Bible contains 4 MB of information. You could store\u00a0approximately\u00a0500 copies of the King James Version Holy Bible on one 2 gigabyte flash drive.<\/p>\n
The human brain can store approximately 4 terabytes of information. Makes you wonder where all that information goes, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A bit, short for binary digit, is the smallest unit of measurement used for information storage in computers. A bit is represented by a 1 or a 0 with a value of true or false, sometimes expressed as on or off. Eight bits form a single byte of information, also known as an octet. Thus, the difference between\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5370"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5371,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5370\/revisions\/5371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}