Bits - basic units of memory

Information is processed and stored in computers as electrical signals. A computer contains thousands of electronic circuits connected by switches that can only be in one of two possible states: ON (the current is flowing through the wire) or OFF (the current is not flowing through the wire). To represent these two conditions we use binary notation in which 1 means ON and 0 means OFF. This is the only way a computer can 'understand' anything. Everything about computers is based upon this binary process. Each 1 or 0 is called a binary digit or bit.

1s and 0s are grouped into eight-digit codes that typically represent characters (letters, numbers and symbols). Eight bits together are called a byte. Thus, each character in a keyboard has its own arrangement of eight bits. For example, 01000001 for the letter A, 01000010 for В.

one bit

example of a byte

The majority of computers use a standard system for the binary representation of characters. This is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, known popularly as ASCII (pronounced 'ask-key'). There are 256 different ways of combining 0 and 1 bits in a byte. So they can give us 256 different signals. However, the ASCII code only uses 128 bytes to represent characters. The rest of the bytes are used for other purposes.

The first 32 codes are reserved for characters such as the Return key, Tab, Escape, etc. Each letter of the alphabet, and many symbols (such as punctuation marks), as well as the ten numbers, have ASCII representations. What makes this system powerful is that these codes are standard.

In order to avoid astronomical figures and sums in the calculation of bytes, we use units such as kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. One kilobyte is 1,024 bytes (2¹º) and it is represented as KB, or more informally as K. One megabyte is equivalent to 1,024 KB, and one gigabyte is 1,024 MB.

We use these units (KB, MB, GB) to describe the RAM memory, the storage capacity of disks and the size of any application or document.