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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the ...
0.6–1.3 bits – approximate information per letter of English text. [3] 2 0: bit: 10 0: bit 1 bit – 0 or 1, false or true, Low or High (a.k.a. unibit) 1.442695 bits (log 2 e) – approximate size of a nat (a unit of information based on natural logarithms) 1.5849625 bits (log 2 3) – approximate size of a trit (a base-3 digit) 2 1
1 bit: Answer to a yes/no question; 1 byte: A number from 0 to 255; 90 bytes: Enough to store a typical line of text from a book; 512 bytes = 0.5 KiB: The typical sector size of an old style hard disk drive (modern Advanced Format sectors are 4096 bytes). 1024 bytes = 1 KiB: A block size in some older UNIX filesystems
Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.
Each of the 24 bits of the significand (including the implicit 24th bit), bit 23 to bit 0, represents a value, starting at 1 and halves for each bit, as follows: bit 23 = 1 bit 22 = 0.5 bit 21 = 0.25 bit 20 = 0.125 bit 19 = 0.0625 bit 18 = 0.03125 bit 17 = 0.015625 . . bit 6 = 0.00000762939453125 bit 5 = 0.000003814697265625 bit 4 = 0. ...
Computer number format. A computer number format is the internal representation of numeric values in digital device hardware and software, such as in programmable computers and calculators. [1] Numerical values are stored as groupings of bits, such as bytes and words. The encoding between numerical values and bit patterns is chosen for ...
1 o = 8 bits. The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term octad (e) for eight bits is no longer common. [1][2]
Very often, when referring to the word size of a modern computer, one is also describing the size of address space on that computer. For instance, a computer said to be "32-bit" also usually allows 32-bit memory addresses; a byte-addressable 32-bit computer can address 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes of memory, or 4 gibibytes (GiB). This allows one ...