Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).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.
A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method for representing numbers that uses only two symbols for the natural numbers: typically "0" and "1" . A binary number may also refer to a rational number that has a finite representation in the binary numeral system, that is, the quotient of an ...
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, is an invention by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (English: Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic) which uses only the characters 1 and 0, and some remarks on its usefulness. Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern ...
An example and comparison of numbers in different bases is described in the chart below. When typing numbers, formatting characters are used to describe the number system, for example 000_0000B or 0b000_00000 for binary and 0F8H or 0xf8 for hexadecimal numbers.
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; 2048 bytes = 2 KiB: A CD-ROM sector
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
Computers rarely modify individual bits for performance reasons. Instead, data is aligned in groups of a fixed number of bits, usually 1 byte (8 bits). Hence, "binary data" in computers are actually sequences of bytes. On a higher level, data is accessed in groups of 1 word (4 bytes) for 32-bit systems and 2 words for 64-bit systems.
This is a list of some binary codes that are (or have been) used to represent text as a sequence of binary digits "0" and "1". Fixed-width binary codes use a set number of bits to represent each character in the text, while in variable-width binary codes, the number of bits may vary from character to character.