... Bytes, Megabytes, and Dog Bites ...

Eight 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.

Your hard drive is described in Gigabytes. 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. The common thing is the byte.

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. 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.

Okay, sizes are interesting. And since you're faced with making decisions about your own computer every day, and how much stuff to store on the machine is one of those decisions, I hope this page has given you a little insight. And that it was actually UNDERSTANDABLE.

Now what do dog bits have to do with this ... absolutely nothing.

Well, any errors or suggestions? ... ... what? everything's working?

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