- Written By: L. S. Wynn
- Edited By: L. S. Wynn
- Last Modified Date: 18 January 2012
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2003-2012 Conjecture Corporation
A bit is the most basic unit of information. At their most fundamental level, most modern computers operate on binary bits which means that they can have two states, usually specified as a 0 or 1. Long strings of these bits can be used to represent most types of information including text, pictures and music.
Most modern computers are binary systems and therefore, they are particularly well suited to working with bits. Pure binary information, however, is of little use to humans. The binary number 11000101110 is equivalent to 1582; it is obvious that we are much more suited to working with digits and text instead of ones and zeros.
To help make computers more like our language-based way of thinking, groups of bits are joined into bytes. One byte is comprised of 8 bits. A set of 8 bits was chosen because this provides 256 total possibilities which is sufficient for specifying letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation and other extended characters. This very sentence, for example is composed of 125 bytes because there are 125 letters, digits, spaces and punctuation marks. Keep in mind that we are discussing pure text; some word processing programs, include other sorts of formatting data, and therefore the filesizes will be greater than the number of characters in the file.
It is estimated that a kilobyte can accommodate about 1/2 of a typewritten page. Therefore, one full page requires about 2 kilobytes. The chart below illustrates the number of bytes in common terms such as kilobyte and megabyte and how much text could be stored:
| name | number of bytes | amount of text |
| kilobyte (kB) | 210 or 1,024 | 1/2 page |
| megabyte (mB) | 220 or 1,048,576 | 500 pages or 1 thick book |
| gigabyte (gB) | 230 or 1,073,741,824 | 500,000 pages or 1,000 thick books |
| terabyte (tB) | 240 or 1,099,511,627,776 | 1,000,000 thick books |
| petabyte | 250 or 1,125,899,906,842,624 | 180 Libraries of Congress |
| exabyte | 260 or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 | 180 thousand Libraries of Congress |
| zettabyte | 270 or 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 | 180 million Libraries of Congress |
| yottabyte | 280 or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 | 180 billion Libraries of Congress |
The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. is said to be the world's largest library with over 28 million volumes. The numbers listed in the chart above are based on the assumption that the average book has 200 pages.
Most Compact Discs (CD) can hold approximately 750 megabytes (mB) which is roughly equivalent to 375,000 pages of text! DVDs can store 4.7 gigabytes (gB) or 2.3 million pages. The next generation of optical media, Blu-Ray discs, can hold an astonishing 27 gigabytes or 13.5 million pages which is roughly equivalent to the text contained in 67,500 books!
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anon213298
Post 3 |
I've got to question the math here. 1 page = 2 kb 200 pg book = 400 kb Library of congress = 28 million books = 11,200,000,000 kb 1 petabyte/28 M books = 100,527 Therefore, there are more than 100,000 library of congress's in a petabyte, not 180 as stated in the chart. What am I missing?
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Catapult
Post 2 |
I always imagined that a kilobyte contained more data than that. Of course, I also thought that the kilobyte to megabyte ratio went by round numbers like thousands, not 1024. I think this was because it sounds like the metric system. This does explain to me a lot more than I knew before about data, though. |
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FernValley
Post 1 |
I have to say that I have never understood anything to do with binary before, and now I can see, to some extent at least, how that system works and how it relates to pure data; even more, I feel more curious about it than before now that I understand at least a little. |
