Ken's Corner
Some terms are so common in your life, you never think about what they are. Likewise, there are terms in business that are taken for granted that everyone knows what they mean because they’re so much a part of it. Of course, that’s rarely correct and some of those terms are confusing as heck.
With computers, one of those is the byte; what is it and how many do I need? What’s a kilobyte? A megabyte?
Let’s start with the basics. A bit is the smallest unit of information a computer can use. A bit is always either 0 or 1. A byte is a set of eight bits which defines a single character such as a letter, a comma, or a number. A byte can represent 256 such symbols. For example, the letter B is one byte of information, while Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a rather precocious 34 bytes.
Multiple bytes are distinguished by prefixes to show size, so rather than saying a computer has four billion (4,000,000,000) bytes of memory, we refer to it as having four Gigabytes. The prefixes currently used most commonly to refer to the number of bytes on a computer are Kilo- (one thousand or 1,000), Mega- (one million or 1,000,000), Giga- (one billion or 1,000,000,000) and Tera- (One trillion or 1,000,000,000,000). Let’s see this in practice.
When man went to the moon on Apollo 11 in July 1969, the onboard computer (the Apollo Guidance Computer) was amazingly compact for its time, measuring just under two feet in length, a foot wide and five inches thick. Memory was four Kilobytes while total storage of the system was 72 Kilobytes. As a comparison, this article would take up about 20% of the Apollo computer’s memory at 16 Kilobytes. Solitaire? Forget it; the file for that program is around 180 Megabytes.
One of the first personal computers offered was the IBM Personal Computer XT model 5160 in 1983. At the time, it was an unbelievable machine with a base 128 Kilobytes of memory (128KB) and 10 Megabytes (10 MB) of storage. It cost nearly $2,000, close to $5,500 in today’s economy. Today’s Fitbit watch, by contrast, has 600 MB and costs around $100.
A typical personal computer today has 16 Gigabytes of memory and 500 Gigabytes of storage and costs around $900 for a good quality system. Technology has made systems smaller, less expensive, and capable of carrying more data. Is there an upper limit to how much data a computer system can have? Yes, but that figure is growing by leaps and bounds. The highest official measurement used for data today is a yottabyte: one septillion (1024) bytes, roughly equivalent to all of the Internet traffic for the entire year of 2016, times 950.
Don’t look for a yottabyte system to be on the shelves anytime soon.
Remember, if you’ve got a question you’d like answered, send me an e-mail at .
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