Bits and Bytes

Do you Remember when I talked about computer language being ones and zeros? So computers work by manipulating 1s and 0s.
These 1s and 0s are referred to as binary digits, which are in short called bits. Because these bits (1s and 0s ) are too small to be of much use, they are grouped together into units of 8 bits.
This 8 bits units is what we now call a byte. Not the bite you are thinking about, I am sure you have heard of kilobyte, megabyte, etc.. so yeah, that byte!

So, a byte is the basic unit of a computer. Remember that a byte is a group of 8 bits. It is because of this fact that  number 8 and its multiples have become important in computing.
You will specifically come across the numbers 8, 16, 32 and 64 in various computing contexts  and this is usually due to the 8-bit byte being the basic building unit.

The key point to appreciate is that although basing your entire system on only two digits (1s and 0s)  may seem limiting, these two digits can be used to represent almost anything.

This is an example of a byte 10000000 that can be used to represent an instruction or information. For example 10000000 could be an instruction representing “ start a program” which is basically telling the computer that it is the beginning or start of that particular program.

You will also hear people speak of kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes or often just ‘K’, ‘meg’ and ‘gig’ as in, ‘This computer has 64 gigs of RAM’, or ‘This file is 45 Kb’.

A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, Megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, gigabytes is 1024 megabytes
It is however common to see 1000 used instead of 1024 in everyday usage.

Fun fact: A nibble refers to 4 bits. So if a nibble refers to a group of 4 bits, what do we call a group of 8 bits? Well, I know you know the answer.

It is important to note that A bit is denoted with a small letter b while a byte is denoted with a capital letter B

Bytes (as well as KB, MB, etc) are commonly used when referring to size of data on a computer while bit measurements can be seen more often in describing network speed.

Therefore, when your network speed is 200Mbps (Megabits per seconds), this means it will take about 8 seconds to download a file of 200 Megabytes (since 1 byte is 8 bits).