A common area of confusion among computer users is dealing with the prefixes we use to relate file sizes. Here is the easiest way I've seen to conceptualize these measurements.

Bit: the smallest unit of measure for data and space that holds it on your computer. This is the level at which all data is either a 1 or a 0.

Byte: made up of eight bits. A byte is equivalent to a character ("a", "b" etc.). The order and combination of the eight ones and zeros (bits) defines a character. eg. 00000001 etc.

Kilobyte: (K or KB ) equals: 1024 bytes

Megabyte: (MB, or M. or meg) equals 1024 kilobytes

Gigabyte: (GB, G or gig) equals 1024 Megabytes

How many bytes do we have in a gigabyte? 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes -- slightly over a billion.

That's a lot of one's and zero's that you have on your hard drive. Have you backed them up latley?

24 March 2003  |   permalink