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:

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.