Date: 8/11/2008

BITS and BYTES

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Many people often ask me about the Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes etc and they also want to know the calculation of these units. Now I'm explaining about it with simple english here. Hope it will be informative for you.
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A phone memory (or other digital memory devices like computer, digital camera etc) is an electrical piece of machinery. Just like ur light bulb, the circuits in a memory system have two states: on and off. "On" is represented by the number 1, and "off" is represented by the number "0". When your phone (or other memory devices like CD's or Flopy's) stores information in its memory or on your memory card, it can record only 1's and 0's. Each "one" or "zero" is called a Bit. It's the smallest unit of digital information.
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Since a Bit can only be a zero or a one, it is not very useful if u write a letter to your friend and you want to save it to your memory. So we need bigger units. For that we make a 8 Bits group. A group of 8 Bits represents each letter of the alphabet. 256 different combinations can be made with 8 zeros and ones, so it's more than enough to cover the alphabet and other special characters like the "*" , "@" etc. These 8 Bits group is called a Byte.
Example :
The capital letter "A" is stored on your phone memory as
01000001
The asterisk symbol "*" is stored on your phone as
00101010
The word "Clinton" would look like this :
010000110110110001101001011011100111010001101111 01101110
This sequence of numbers comprises seven letters, so it takes 7 Bytes of your memory. So when u save an SMS of 160 characters, your phone will show its properties as 160 Bytes (though some phones may show the approximate value as 1KB).
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NOTE :Above example is about text files. But this explaination is applicable for any type of files.
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Since a Byte can only hold a very small piece of information, we often think in terms of Kilobytes, Megabytes, and Gigabytes. But what do these terms mean?
A kilobyte (KB) is technically defined as 1024 Bytes. In simple words 1024 Bytes are called 1 Kilobyte (some people think that 1000 Bytes is called 1 Kilobyte, but technically it is not the case). Just like this, A Megabyte (MB) is technically defined as 1024 Kilobytes or 1048576 Bytes. And a Gigabyte (GB) is technically defined as 1024 Megabytes or 1048576 Kilobytes.
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So after the above explaination, we can calculate these digital units like this :-
8 Bits = 1 Byte ;
1024 Bytes = 1 KB ;
1024 KB = 1 MB ;
1024 MB = 1 GB ;
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Sanou Singha 2008



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