0 = 0
1 = 1
2 = 10
3 = 11
4 = 100
5 = 101
6 = 110
7 = 111
8 = 1000
9 = 1001
10 = 1010
11 = 1011
12 = 1100
13 = 1101
14 = 1110
15 = 1111
16 = 10000
17 = 10001
18 = 10010
19 = 10011
20 = 10100
When you see a bit it usually is never by itself. They are usually packed together in a set of 8 bits. This is called a byte.
The good thing about bytes is you can hold more place values with them. They look like this:0 = 00000000
1 = 00000001
2 = 00000010
...
254 = 11111110
255 = 11111111
There are a few neat things about bytes and bits. A byte can make up to 256 characters
Standard for bytes to hold is 127 characters. These codes are used a lot of the time
in text documents that are both stored in memory and stored on a disk.
All of this stuff is important because this is how we do many of the things we do on
our computers. If the bits and bytes where never found out or created then we would
not be able to do the things that we do like write papers on the computer. Bits and
bytes may seem complicated but when you look at the system especially for the binary
system it all really makes a lot of sense.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Bits and Bytes
When hearing about the bits and bytes in class I didn't really understand them too much, so I did a little bit of research on my own. I will share with you a few things that I learned. Bits work in decimal and binary. In binary bits hold a place value that goes up by the power of 2 each time, from what I understand. It looks like this:
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I couldn't imagine the stress level when dealing with bits and decimals. Good thing that we learned a different system. Using bytes is evidently way easier. In this blog I would have included why when people download something off the internet, it shows kilobytes.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I did understand bits and bytes alot more. That is pretty crazy about how much a single bit or byte can hold up to and trying to figure all that out to put together must have been wild. That would require alot of work to try putting everything together and like Stephan said the stress that would come along with it, must really not be fun.
ReplyDeleteIt amazes me that the first computer programmers had the patience to program binary code into every program. The diligence it must have taken to go through and make sure that there were no errors in the numbers must have taken a large chunk of time. Yet they did it and today we can program with much more ease, because of the hard work that these people put in to develop these systems.
ReplyDeleteNow that I read this I understand more clearly. But I don't know how anyone could stand figuring out all that number jumble and making it work and fit within everything. It's amazing what the bits and bytes hold though for sure.
ReplyDeleteDesiree, I agree with you. In class when this was explained I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the subject. To me it did not make sense, and frankly I did not care that it didn't make sense. I never had any interest in learning. All in all, my computer worked and I was happy that someone else had the ingenuity to figure it out. However, now that you and Prof. Drake have explained it in more detail it really doesn't seem that overwhelming. It does still intrigue me though that before this existed someone had the presence of mind to believe that it could.
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