Digital Measurement Basics
Size conversions:
1 bit cannot be seen (0 or 1)
1 byte is 8 bits (1 character)
1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes ~ very short story
1 megabyte is 1,024 KB ~ About 1 minute of 128 kbit/s MP3 compressed music. or a 4 megapixel JPEG image with normal compression
1 gigabyte is 1,024 MB ~ Seven minutes of HDTV video at 19.39 Mbit/s or 114 minutes of uncompressed CD-quality audio at 1.4 Mbit/s
1 terabyte is 1,024 GB ~ About 17,000 hours of audio recorded at 128 kB/s
1 petabytes is 1,024 TB ~ storage of videos for streaming on Netflix or It is estimated that the human brain‘s ability to store memories is equivalent to about 2.5 petabytes of binary data
1 exabyte is 1,024 PB ~ In January of 2011 Oracle Corporation claimed the first Exabyte tape library so this is the next big thing..
In the future:
1 zettabyte or ZB is 1,024 EB ~ Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech ever spoken at 42 zettabytes if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio.
1 yottabyte or YB is 1024 ZB ~ one quadrillion gigabytes
Analog verses Digital
Electric current can be off or on, and via transistors and micro chips, is a perfect binary system requiring only two digits to represent the two states of on or off. Analog technology is based on varying a continuous signal to convey information or to transmit audio or visual data. from eHow.com
Lets start at the very beginning.
A bit is the smallest unit of information understood by a computer. A bit can take a value of 0 or 1. A byte is made up of 8 bits which is large enough to contain a single character.
Standard ASCII Chart
Extended ASCII Chart
Binary-coded decimal
In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight.
| Decimal Digit |
BCD 8 4 2 1 |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0 0 0 0 |
| 1 | 0 0 0 1 |
| 2 | 0 0 1 0 |
| 3 | 0 0 1 1 |
| 4 | 0 1 0 0 |
| 5 | 0 1 0 1 |
| 6 | 0 1 1 0 |
| 7 | 0 1 1 1 |
| 8 | 1 0 0 0 |
| 9 | 1 0 0 1 |
Binary Humor:
There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand the binary system and those who don’t.
Converters:
B MB GB TB Converter Have you ever been confused about the number of kilobytes in a megabyte, or in a gigabyte or vice-versa? Now you can convert among bytes and kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes and terabytes with ease.
kb mb converter search with Google offers a converter in the search results.. Try it out!
If you want to go a little further… KB, MB, GHz, and All of That Stuff
If you have any questions or additional resources please post a comment.