Understanding Bits & Bytes - 01011001
A Modern day Miracle
 

You and I think and have been trained to communicate in letters, words of our native language and in numbers, symbols and to appreciate all the musical tones our ears can hear and the 16.4 million colors our eyes can behold.


by Gary L. Foster

Our computers have digitized in bits and bytes all of man's capabilities to both see and hear the world around us.  Computer engineers have assigned a sequence of numbers to every tone of sound and to every shade of color, to every letter, number and symbol of every language on Earth.  And the computer can process these bits and bytes through its processors at the speed of light.

As mans desire to put everything onto digital retrievable systems has progressed so have the capacities of our Hard Disks, DVD, Cd, USB Memory Sticks, Zip Drives & Floppies.  We use each of these to retrieve our favorite computer operating systems, software programs, music and pictures.  The only two differences is the speed they can access information to present it too our computer screens or earphones and in the digital capacity of each to hold information.

We express the byte size capacities usually in Megabytes which is equal to 1024 kilobytes or roughly 1 million bytes.  For example the byte size of a Floppy Disk is usually expressed as 1.44 Megs (1,440,000 bytes).  A Zip Drive as 100 or 250 Megs.  A Cd as 750 Megs.  A DVD as either 4.7 or 8.5 Gigabytes (now we have jumped up to Billions of bytes.  1 Gig equals 1 billion bytes).  The new byte size capacity terms you will hear about as time goes on and man's desire to have all the knowledge of the World both currently and from time past available too us instantly upon our request will include these (perhaps) new terms too you.

I have listed them from the smallest bit size to the largest byte sizes now named.  Remember everything gets its start from 1 bit because it is the foundation of storing all knowledge in a combination of zeros and ones.

  • a bit is set to either a 1 or a 0

  • a byte is 8 bits

  • a kilobyte is a 1024 bytes

  • a megabyte is a 1024 kilobytes

  • a gigabyte is a 1024 megabytes

  • a terabyte is a 1024 gigabytes

  • a petabyte is a 1024 terabytes

  • an exabyte is a 1024 petabytes

  • a zettabyte is a 1024 exabytes

  • a yottabyte is a 1024 zettabytes

Current computer operating systems (DOS) have needed to expand their capacity to process information more quickly as our needs have expanded.  For example the term FAT 16 has a 2 Gig per partition limit on all operating systems except for Windows NT where the limit goes up to 4 Gigs.  This is accomplished by increasing the cluster size to 64 k.  FAT 32 it limited to 2 Terabytes except for when used with Windows 2000 in which case it is limited to 4 Terabytes.  NTFS 1.0 through 5.0 is limited to 15 Exabytes.

Future computer operating systems (DOS) will need to continue the upward climb to satisfy man's need to know anything he desires and to know it instantly.  Wow, what a challenge in so short a period of time.

Here is an example the color Green (note no Red or Blue shades)
and displayed in Hex language (00800) as read by a computer.

Here are two examples of the data read by your computer in Hex or Decimal bytes.

Personally, I feel much better having gone to school and learned my ABC's, don't you?

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