{"id":44,"date":"2008-03-14T00:01:52","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T07:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/14\/here-a-byte-there-a-byte\/"},"modified":"2008-03-14T06:34:42","modified_gmt":"2008-03-14T13:34:42","slug":"here-a-byte-there-a-byte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"Here a Byte, There a Byte"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever try to get a handle on the terms <em>megabyte<\/em> or <em>gigabyte<\/em>? I hear people discuss these electronic yardsticks in normal conversation these days. Some know what they mean, but I feel that few really have a handle on how dang much information there really is in a gigabyte.<\/p>\n<p>First a refresher.<\/p>\n<p>A byte is a unit of data storage. Technically a byte stores 8 bits of information on a modern computer. (Though a byte is not always 8 bits. There were 5, 6, 7 and even 10 bit bytes at one time or another.)<\/p>\n<p>Through the mystery of binary math, there are 256 possible combinations of the 8 bits in a byte, meaning that a byte can store values from 0 up to 255. Most commonly in a computer, those values represent a character. So the text <code>bellybutton<\/code> requires 11 bytes of computer storage.<\/p>\n<p>By itself a byte is fairly useless. Early computers came with hundreds of bytes of storage. Eventually that number increased to thousands of bytes. To quickly express that quantity, the term <em>kilobyte<\/em> (K or KB) was used. <em>Kilo<\/em> comes from the Greek word \u03c7\u03b9\u03bb\u03b9\u03b1, which means 1,000.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Sidebar.<\/strong> Traditionally, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. But most people believe it to be 1,000 bytes. That&#8217;s okay. Computer scientists use the word <em>kibibyte<\/em> to mean the value 1,024. That&#8217;s because 1024 is a binary value, 2<sup>10<\/sup>. You can ignore this sidebar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As computers expanded their storage, larger values were used:<\/p>\n<p>After the kilobyte comes the <em>megabyte<\/em> (M or MB), about one million bytes of storage. During the 1980s computer memory was measured in kilobytes and disk storage measured in megabytes.<\/p>\n<p>After the megabyte comes the <em>gigabyte<\/em> (G or GB). It&#8217;s <em>gig<\/em> with a hard G, not <em>jig-a-byte<\/em>. A gigabyte stores over one billion bytes of information. Computers in the 1990s measured memory in megabytes and disk storage in gigabytes.<\/p>\n<p>We are now in the <em>terabyte<\/em> era. A terabyte (TB) stores one trillion bytes of information. You can buy terabyte hard drives. (Though most terabyte drives are simply two 500 gigabyte drives in one box.)<\/p>\n<p>After terabyte comes the <em>petabyte<\/em> (PB).<br \/>\nAfter petabyte comes the <em>exabyte<\/em> (EB).<br \/>\nAfter exabyte comes the <em>zettabyte<\/em> (ZB).<br \/>\nAfter zettabyte comes the <em>yottabyte<\/em> (YB).<\/p>\n<p>No, I&#8217;m not making any of that up.<\/p>\n<p>Someday your grandkids (or great-great-grandkids) will be bemoaning the fact that their lousy petabyte iPod is incapable of full 3D realistic reality reproduction and why didn&#8217;t you pony up the 400 Euros to get them the 6 exabyte model instead?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever try to get a handle on the terms megabyte or gigabyte? I hear people discuss these electronic yardsticks in normal conversation these days. Some know what they mean, but I feel that few really have a handle on how dang much information there really is in a gigabyte. First a refresher. A byte is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}