Bits & Bytes.

A reader asks:
Bits, bytes. I've never had the nerve to ask anyone what they really are. But since this is anonymous, what are they?

We're glad you asked.

Coincidently, we just read The Expanding Digital Universe, a March 2007 white paper by IDC. Excerpts below are pulled straight from there... So they get credit for the answer. We just get credit for knowing where to find it.

WHAT ARE BITS AND BYTES?
A "bit" is the smallest unit of information that can be stored in a computer, and consists of either a 1 or 0 (or on/off state). All computer calculations are in bits. A "byte" is a collection of 8 bits. Bytes are convenient because, when converted to computer code, they can represent 256 characters, such as numbers or letters. So a byte is 8 times larger than a bit. Common aggregations for bytes come in multiples of 1,000, such as kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and so on. The progression is as follows:

Bit (b) 1 or 0
Byte (B) 8 bits
Kilobyte (KB) 1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB) 1,000 KB
Gigabyte (GB) 1,000 MB
Terabyte (TB) 1,000, GB
Petabyte (PB) 1,000 TB
Exabyte (EB) 1,000 PB
Zettabyte (ZB) 1,000 EB

This seems simple enough, except sometimes multiples of bytes are considered as powers of 2, since the original machine language only has two states, 1 or 0. A kilobyte would then be 210 bytes, or 1,024 bytes. A megabyte would be 220 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes, and so on.

For the sake of simplicity, in all calculations for this research we used the decimal system we mentioned first.

And now that you have that under your belt, check this out:

• In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that's 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.

• Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.

Jinkies. Those are some big numbers. See you again for the next Stump the Researcher!