Tamara Fakhoury ITGS 11th Grade

3.1 Hardware Bits and Bytes 12/Oct/2010

I. Instruction
- World of computers, information is digital: made up of digits
- Bit (binary digit):the smallest unit of information a computer can process
Can only have one of two values: 0 and 1
Think of them as yes-no; black-white; on-off; etc…
Binary= a choice of two values (0 and 1)
- A computer can process large chunks of information by treating groups of bits as logical units.
For example: a group of 8 bits (byte) can represent 256 different messages. (256 = 28)
Order is important as well. Example: 01 is different than 10
Bits as NUMBERS
- Numbers are represented using the binary number system
Today’s computer software converts decimal numbers into binary numbers automatically, and vice
versus. Binary number processing is completely hidden from the users.
Bits as Codes
- ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange= 8 bit codes)
- Unicode: a 65,000-character set for making letters, digits, and special characters fit for the computer’s
binary circuitry. Used to facilitate multilingual computing.
Bits as Instructions in Programs
- Program instructions are represented in binary notation through the use of codes. Programs are stored
as collections of bits.
- Vocabulary:
Byte: a logical group of 8 bits. (One character of the ASCII-encoded text)
Kilobyte (KB or K): About 1,000 bytes of information
Megabyte (MB): About 1,000 KB, or 1 million bytes
Gigabyte (GB): About 1,000 MB, or 1 billion bytes
Terabyte (TB): About 1 million MB or 1 trillion bytes
Petabyte (PB): About 1,000 TB, or 1 quadrillion bytes (not possible to store this amount of data yet)
*** Exabyte (EB)
*** Zettabyte (ZB)
*** Yottabyte (YB)
- KB, MB, GB, TB, and PB are used to describe the capacity of memory and storage components.
Examples: Computer with memory RAM of 512MB and a hard disk having 120GB storage capacity.

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Tamara Fakhoury ITGS 11th Grade
3.1 Hardware Bits and Bytes 12/Oct/2010

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