Byte

Bit can only do so much on his own; but when he is with friends, he becomes much more powerful. As soon as he gathers eight Bits in total, a transformation happens and Byte emerges soaring through the highways of every electronic device that has a processor. With his 256 combinations, he can command the Processor to do specific tasks, provide it with the input it needs, and a place to store the output. So, standing at the heart of every piece of software capable of manipulating the processor, it is only natural that Byte loves to explore and learn more about software here in Computer Adventures and he will gladly teach you along the way.

48 69 20 74 68 65 72 65 21 20 57 6F 75 6C 64 20 79 6F 75 20 61 6C 73 6F 20 6C 69 6B 65 20 74 6F 20 6C 65 61 72 6E 20 6D 6F 72 65 20 61 62 6F 75 74 20 73 6F 66 74 77 61 72 65 2C 20 61 6E 64 20 68 6F 77 20 63 6F 6D 70 75 74 65 72 73 20 63 6F 6D 6D 75 6E 69 63 61 74 65 20 62 6F 74 68 20 69 6E 74 65 72 6E 61 6C 6C 79 20 61 6E 64 20 65 78 74 65 72 6E 61 6C 6C 79 3F 20 43 6F 6D 65 20 61 6C 6F 6E 67 2C 20 61 6E 64 20 49 27 6C 6C 20 73 68 6F 77 20 79 6F 75 21

Hi there! Would you also like to learn more about software, and how computers communicate both internally and externally? Come along, and I'll show you!

Hover over Byte or click here to see what he says!

Hi there! Would you also like to learn more about software, and how computers communicate both internally and externally? Come along, and I'll show you!

The Train Wagon

Byte consists of multiple Bits, making him an integral piece to make computers do the magic that we know and love today. Imagine that Byte is a train wagon; it has the capacity for eight Bits to bring to their destination. It chugs along the tracks to different parts of the computer, delivering the Bits to various components. Sometimes they form a character, other times an instruction for the CPU, occasionaly an address in memory; they can be anything the computer needs.
One of the first things Byte stored was ASCII and it's the reason why you can read this article; it has all the letters of the alphabet, all the punctuation symbols such as the period and comma, and a few extra control characters for formatting among other things. So, these train wagons of Bytes rarely travel alone, especially these days. You can put multiple train wagons after one another and turn it into one big train full of data. After all, every character you read is one Byte, websites would be pretty slow if they would load one Byte at a time, don't you think?

If you've read other articles in this world, you might have noticed that I tend to talk in clusters of eight zeroes and ones. That's each character you read, but in binary!
01001100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100001

Click here to see what Bit says!

Like this!

Hexadecimal

One more thing, you might have noticed that Byte talks differently than Bit in his quote; it is not binary but hexadecimal. When writing numbers, us mere humans use the decimal notation using the numbers 0 to 9 to create numbers; when using binary we have just the two options zero and one. Hexadecimal has 16 options per character, so that notation uses the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters a to e to notate its value.

Why is this important?

A block of four bits gives 16 different combinations of zeroes and ones. Would you look at that, that's exactly the number of combinations one character notation in hexadecimal has! This allows programmers to notate a Byte in the lowest level of code in two characters rather than eight. It is a small change, but a compact one at that.

Family

Bit
Bug
Nibble

Current Location

Cruising over Processors Internal Data Bus

Favourite Joke

I started a band called 999 MegaBytes
But we haven't got a Gig yet...

Storage Conversion

You might have seen this when buying a new computer, storage of a computer is nowadays noted as TB or GB but what does it mean? Here is a little table to help with the conversion between the different "whatever" Byte you find out there.

Name	Value in Bytes
kilobyte (kB)	1.000
megabyte (MB)	1.000.000
gigabyte (GB)	1.000.000.000
terabyte (TB)	1.000.000.000.000
petabyte (PB)	1.000.000.000.000.000
exabyte (EB)	1.0006
zettabyte (ZB)	1.0007
yottabyte (YB)	1.0008

The average modern day computer has a storage of 1TB. As a comparison, some experts claim that the Google Datacenters has 5 to 10 exabytes of storage, which is 5 to 10 million times more than the average computer!