Hi Juan and David,
What I really like about my computer is that I push a button and a cup holder
pops out.
Pastor gil
----- Original Message -----
From: Juan Gonzalez
To: David ; GW-Micro
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: Getting To Know Your Computer - BITS & BYTES
thanks this really helped me understand how computers work and explained some
of the terminology behind it all!
From: David
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 5:52 PM
To: WE English mailing list
Subject: Getting To Know Your Computer - BITS & BYTES
How often have you been talking to some computer guy, and all the certain
found yourself, in a situation where you feel like hurled around in terms like
Megabytes, GB, and KB's? Have you ever been wondering what all of this means?
Whether you are to buy a new hard disk, a USB pen drive, a memory card for your
music player or digital camera, or if you are to upgrade the RAM on your
computer - the sales person wants to know how many Gigabytes you want. All of
these terms are bewildering, long as you don't know how to distinguish the one
from the other. This article aims for giving you some basic understanding of
the following:
- Get familiar with the terms: Bit, Byte, KB, Mb, Gb, Tb.
- Basic understanding of the terms: Binary and Hexadecimal numbers.
- Do I need to care?
- How much storage do I need on my computer system, music player, or digital
camera?
It is the goal of mine, to keep this information as simple and comprehendable
as possible. Unfortunately, this is technical, and special mathematical
matters, so it might not be all that easy to grasp the full meaning of it. As a
comfort, I will tell you, that it takes several weeks in college to get to the
bottom of some of these things. Therefore, this article is not meant to educate
anyone. Still, upon finishing reading the following, hopefully you will feel a
bit more comfortable with the terms, and can make more informed decisions as to
your system.
As always, I am eager to know, if you find the information helpful, and if
there is things you feel could have been expressed more fully. Feel free to
leave me any feedback.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND
In our alphabet, we have 26 letters, and some non-English languages have
several additional characters. In addition, our writing language, includes ten
digits, and a number of punctuations, as well as a good handful of mathematic
and graphical symbols. This makes up a rather numerous amount of possible
characters. For a human, this is merely a matter of training. Just think back
to your first few weeks in school. Some training, pretty soon taught you the
difference between the letter A, and the number 4. Soon as you see a character,
in a printed material, you readily will recognize it. And, even if the
character is hand-written, by a person with lower writing skills, you are able
to determine the correct character, by it's shape and the context. All of this,
due to the fact, that the human brain is a masterpiece of creation.
On the other hand, for a computer, the matter gets a bit more complicated. Of
course, it would have been possible to have the computer store different
characters with the help of variations in magnetism., That way, the letter A
would have a strong magnetism, whilest the letter Z would have a less strong
magnetism. Well, technically, it is possible. But it does bring up a load of
possible scenarios. What if the storage media gets affected - the very least -
by its surroundings, causing the magnetism to weaken in one little spot? Or, if
we would have transfered information electronically, like over the internet,
and the power would drop just a fraction? In such cases, the result would be a
change of the stored, or transfered, information. With the huge amount of
information, our modern-day technology is processing, along with the high speed
it's working on, just a small change of a few pieces of information, could be
no less than critical.
To handle this matter, the engineers behind the computer technology, decided
to have a rather 'simple' but 'safe' way of handling information. The best way
to do so, is when you have a two-state system. Think of your lamp. It has a
switch, which either can be turned ON, or OFF. There is no real chance of it to
take any other position. In modern-day computers, there is litterally billions
of tiny switches, although they are not mechanical, but electronic switches.
BITS, BYTES, KB, MB, GB & TB
In Computer technology, we call each little switch a BIT. It doesn't take a
lot of figuring, to understand, that it would be rather complicated, to keep
track of a thousand switches - let alone billions of them. That is why, we
group them into bigger chunks.
Imagine, that you have a load of 32 switches placed on the table, in front of
you. If now, I asked you to check switch number 21, it would have taken you
some time, to count your way through the load. On the other hand, if you had
grouped the switches into clusters of 8 switches, your job would have been far
more easy. And, that is exactly what the computer does. It groups 8 bits, into
a cluster, which we call one BYTE.
In the old days, when computerized technology first came around, the machines
only could handle a relatively small amount of information. In those days, it
was OK, to talk about some hundreds of bytes, in a given setting. As the
computers grew more powerful, they started to handle a growing number of bytes.
To make it easier for humans to keep track of the rather huge amounts of
information, that modern-day computers operates, we divide the total amount of
bytes into Thousands, Millions, and Billions of bytes. As with many other
things, first it has to be technical, let's do it fully. :) So, the engineers
did not want to talk about thousands of bytes, they would rather have a more
fancy term: Kilo Bytes, or KB. To be fully exact here, one KB is actually 1024
Bytes. Why 1024? A bit of mathematics behind that stuff, and we will leave that
for now. In the daily life, we would look upon one KB as a thousand bytes.
Computers continued to grow; and so did the stream of information to be
handled. Soon the computers handled millions of bytes, and again, there was a
need of a fancy term to describe the amount. This time we got Mega Byte, or MB.
And later on, when we ran into billions of bytes, we started to talk about Giga
Byte, or GB. Lately, not even billions of bytes will do, and people now are
operating computers, that easily can store, and handle, trillions of bytes. In
computer terms, this is called Tetra Bytes, or TB.
To sum up all of this, you have the following list:
. 1 Byte = 8 Bits.
. 1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1000 bytes.
. 1 Megabyte (MB) = 1000 KB = 1 million Bytes.
. 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 MB = 1 billion Bytes.
. 1 Tetrabyte (TB) = 1000 GB = 1 trillion bytes.
Note that, the above numbers are approximate. As I already mentioned, the
exact number of 1 KB, is actually 1024 Bytes. At the end of this article, you
will find a list, showing the exact numbers. The approximates given above,
though, is sufficient for daily use. But how does this ever affect you, as an
average computer user?
HOW MUCH STORAGE DO I NEED
Each character you see on your screen, consists basically of ONE Byte of
information. When you hit the letter S on your keyboard, your computer handles
8 Bits, or 1 Byte, of information. In addition, your computer has to store
information about the color, and the location, of the character, on your
screen. Or, if you want to save your work on your hard disk, or your USB pen
drive, it will take a given amount of Bytes of space. Allright, so to make it
as simple as possible, if you want to have a bigger amount of storage space on
your hard disk, you might want to go to the store, and ask for a hard disk with
a higher number of MB, GB or TB.
But is it only your writings that will make use of your Bytes of storage?
Fact is, that absolutely ALL the stuff you are storing on your computer, is
stored the same way; by use of Bits and Bytes. A typical music file, of an
average length for a pop song, would range from 3.5 to 5.5 MB in MP3-format,
and 20 to 50 MB in CD-format. A typical size of a picture, taken by your
digital camera, would take up everything from 300 KB to close to 1 MB of space.
As you can see, we are pretty soon adding up to a rather high amount of
Gigabytes.
So how much stuff are you actually able to store on your media? In your
camera, the math is somehow easy. It depends a little on the resolution (or the
amount of pixels) of your camera. But if your camera currently has a memory
card of 1GB, and you are able to store 2000 pictures on it, getting a memory
card of 2GB, would leave you the chance of storing approximately 4000 pictures.
Again, with the camera, this math is basically that easy, since the camera in
general makes pictures of approximately the same size, all the time. It gets a
bit more complicated, when comes to your music player. Pieces of music, can be
stored in different qualities, and the length of one song, might differ greatly
from that of another. Simply doubling the size of your storage capacity, does
not necessary tell that you can have twice as many songs in your pocket
hereafter. Still, it is a good guiding rule, to reason that doubling your
storage capacity for music, will leave you an increase by 1.7 to 1.9 from what
you had before. I won't go more into details, as to why this is the case. When
comes to your computer, since it is storing a load of different material, it is
impossible to tell how many more pages of documents, or how many more songs or
pictures, you will be able to store, if you increase your systems sorage
capacity. In general, though, if you are out for shopping a new hard disk for
your computer, you have to keep in mind, what kind of material you mainly will
be storing.
As an example, if your current hard disk is 250 GB, and you mainly are
storing text documents, increasing the capacity to a 300 GB, would leave you
chances of writing quite a few books. One page of plain text, for instance,
would only take up a couple of KB on your hard disk. Most computer programs
will only take up a few MB of space, so even if you are planning to install a
good chunk of software, an increase of 50GB, would leave you good chances. On
the other hand, if you are mainly storing music, or even video files, another
50 GB extra will have little effect, as it will be filled in a rather short
time. To give you a bit of an idea, one standard CD, typically holds
approximately 0.65 GB of information. A DVD film, could easily hold from 2 to 4
GB. So you see, 50 GB would be running fast.
What then about your PC's RAM, or memory? Will increasing the RAM on your
system, from 1GB to 2GB, make the PC go twice as fast? The simple answer is NO.
And why not? Several factors play their role, inside your PC, as to the overall
performance in speed. For one thing, the processor (or CPU). I will get back on
this in details in a later article. Still, increasing the RAM on a computer, is
generally a good idea, and might likely speed up your system to some extend,
and might make your PC run more smoothly.
A third scenario, where you will meet the terms discussed in this article, is
when comes to your internet connection. If you are using a modem for your
connection, your local computer will 'speak' to the internet with a speed of 56
thousand Bits, every second. Take your computer to a place with a wireless
network, and try to hook it up with the internet. Now, it is communicating with
a speed of about 54 million Bits a second. But, what then, if you decide to put
your home PC on a wired broadband network? In such a case, your computer would
be communicating, with a maximum speed of 100 million Bits a second. Even if
you don't understand the technology behind all of this, it doesn't take too
much of mathematic, to figure out, that the higher speed your PC and the
Internet are communicateing, the faster you will get your information. And,
even when you are connected via a broadband (DSL) connection, the speed in
which your Internet provider (ISP) lets you get to the information, is given
with a number of KB, or MB, per second. The higher the number is, the quicker
your connection will work. This is of special intrest, when sending and
receiving higher amounts of information, like music and video; but even plays a
role, as to whether you will take one second, or ten, to enter on certain
webpages.
THE BINARY SYSTEM
Let's for a moment, go back to our illustration of the light switch. As you
know, it can either be turned ON, or OFF. That is what we call a binary,
meaning two-state. If we had defined the ON position as 1, and the OFF position
as 0, we are ready to take the whole thing into the electronic world of the
computer. Absolutely everything inside your computer, is handled by Zeros and
Ones. Your one light switch has only two positions, so you only can represent
two different states - the 0 (OFF), or the 1 (ON). But what happens if you had
two switches? You now will be able to make the following four settings:
Setting 1: Switch1 = OFF, Swich2 = OFF.
Setting 2: Switch1 = OFF, Switch2 = ON.
Setting 3: Switch1 = ON, Switch2 = OFF.
Setting 4: Switch1 = ON, Switch2 = ON.
And if I gave you a third switch, you would be capable of making 8 different
settings. With four switches, the amount of settings would turn into 16; 5
switches would make 32 possible settings; and so forth. For each extra switch
you add on to the link, there will be twice as many possible settings. By the
time you reach 8 switches, your number of possible settings, will have reached
256. If you want to play on your own, get hold of a handful switches, and start
to do your experimenting. Have much fun!
Again, if we take this inside the computer, each switch is called a Bit. As
you remember, there is 8 Bits in 1 Byte. In other words, every byte on your
system, can be set to 256 different states.
Every character - letters, digits, punctuations and symbols - has its own
combination of Bits. A capital B, for instance, has the combination 66, or in
binary
01000010
while as the digit 9, is combination 57, or binary
00111001.
Noone expects you to put too much interest in the Zeros and Ones, shown
above. What might be of interest, though, is that all the 256 combinations,
that a set of 8 Bits can make up, has been put into a standardized table. You
might have heard of the ASCII code. This is no more than refering to that
particular table. In other words, the capital B, on your machine, has ASCII
code 66, capital C is 67, and so forth.
As you start to add up all the different characters your computer is able to
display, and take into consideration that there is many different languages in
this world, you soon will realize that the 256 possibilities of the Byte, is
getting kind of short. In recent years, the computers have started to work with
an expanded version of the ASCII table, called UniCode. The UniCode makes use
of two bytes for each character, leaving us with thousands of possible
representations. Again, this might not be of greatest importance to you, but at
least, now you know what the terms mean, and why they are being used.
THE HEXADECIMAL SYSTEM
As you saw, in the previous examples, one Byte consists of eight 0's and 1's.
To read information this way, would be rather tidious for a human. Specially
so, when you have to read through larger amounts of material, like certain
flavors of computer programming code. The engineers, therefore, often operates
with another system, called the Hexadecimal system. There is little chance,
that you personally will have to operate this kind of code, so we won't go too
deep into the matter here. But since I have wet your appetite, let me just run
through the basics of the Hexadecimal system. In our normal human world, we
have a mathematic system made up of ten digits - 0 through 9. The Hexadecimal
system, takes all of these ten digits, and add on the letters from A to F;
leaving us with a system made up of a total of 16 characters. If you had looked
at a computer program code, written in hexadecimal coding, it would have looked
something like:
00 0B 1F 3D 1C 9E 23 10 0A
Not exactly readable for most of us. :) Luckily, the engineers decided to
have the computer show us characters, rather than Binary or Hexadecimal codes,
on our computer screens.
Here is the exact numbers for the KB, MB, GB and TB:
1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1024 Bytes,
1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 KB = 1048576 bytes,
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 * MB = 1073741824 Bytes,
1 Tetrabyte (TB) = 1024 * GB = 1099511627776 Bytes.
---End of article---
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