Section 7 - How Computers Work

The 0's and 1's are referred to as bits. (The smallest unit of information on a computer.) The next unit of measure is a byte. A byte is a combination of 8 bits.

An easy way to remember bit and byte is to think about building blocks. Pretend you have eight individual blocks that represent bits. The blocks or bits are scattered randomly on the floor. You can take the blocks (or bits) and place them next to each other to build a byte (8 bits stuck together).

Similarly, multiple bytes can be combined to form even more complex units of information. Examples of these units are the kilobyte (KB), the megabyte (MB,) and the gigabyte(GB). A kilobyte is 2 to the 10th power bytes or 1,024 bytes, a megabyte is 2 to the 20th power bytes or 1,048,576 bytes, and the gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes.