Computers look like they understand numbers and letters as we know them and type them in but that is not the way computers work. Instead every character it sees is coverted into a combination of just 2 numbers and they are 0 and 1. Some of you may recall from your school days that expressing numbers in just 0 and 1 only is binary code (bi=2).
Our number system uses the 10 numbers 0-9 and is known in maths terms as the decimal system. Binary, by comparison, uses just 2 numbers 0 and 1 and every number and letter as we know it can be expressed in 0's and 1's. This works perfectly in computers because at their core computers work by a series electronic signals or pulses and only understand 2 instructions - 'on' and 'off'. Off = 0 and On =1. That's taken some of the mystery out of it !
Without getting into the mathematics of creating binary number let's just look at how the numbers 0-10 look like, expressed in computer binary code:
| No | In Binary |
| 0 | 00000000 |
| 1 | 00000001 |
| 2 | 00000010 |
| 3 | 00000011 |
| 4 | 00000100 |
| 5 | 00000101 |
| 6 | 00000110 |
| 7 | 00000111 |
| 8 | 00001000 |
| 9 | 00001001 |
| 10 | 00001010 |
Likewise for letters - A is expressed as 01000001 for example (see more ) . If you would like to see how a computer sees your name just type it in this text to binary convertor
That is just an example and you can see there is a pattern and if you would like to check what any number looks like in binary see HERE
Now the other thing you will notice from the above is that each binary number is a combination of 8 0's and 1's. Now this is very important as we are at the root of what are bits, bytes and megabites and gigabites.
1 BIT = 1 digit of either 0 or 1
1 BYTE = 8 BITs = 1 set of 8 0's or 1's as shown above
1 KILOBYTE = 1024 Bytes
1 MEGABYTE = 1024 Kilobytes
1 GIGABYTE = 1024 Megabytes
Another way of understanding this is that 1 Megabyte of data is 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 bytes or numbers spaces and letters as we see them and assuming about 7 characters per word including spacing that is roughly 150,000 words. To put 1 Gigabyte capacity in context it is over 1 billion bytes ( or numbers and letters) and that's enough space for about 1.5 million words - a lot !
You may be wondering why it's 1024 and not 1000. Without getting too deep this is because binary code only has 2 numbers and permutations will be "2 to the power of n" and 2 to the power of 10 = 1024. That may be well short of a full and complete answer but it's just to explain why. It may be convenient to view 1 gigabyte as a 1000 megabytes but in fact it's always a bit more than that. There's oodles of articles on the web if you feel curious about getting to understand more about this aspect but for this article we only feel it useful to reference it.
So now that you know what it's all about are 0 and 1 the most important numbers in the world today? It's not even probably - they are. Without them no internet, no Microsoft, no Apple and you wouldn't be reading this.
And finally this entire article on bits and bytes has about 570 words or 2820 characters so in computer language that is 2820 bytes = 2.75 kilobytes of data.
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