Bits'n'Bytes

As heard on CJCD

Episode 1

Good morning, and welcome to this week's installment of Bits 'n' Bytes - brought to you by Bowco Computer Services.

Today, I thought I'd talk about prefixes. A lot of people ask me, "Hey, Dave, is an 80 Gigabyte hard drive big?", or maybe, "128 Megabytes of RAM - that's a lot, right?"
Ever wonder what all these crazy prefixes: Kilo, Mega, Giga, and Tera all mean?
Well, they're all based on the decimal system, believe it or not. For example, a "byte" is one piece of data (not even equal to a single letter, in English). Now, from the metric system - every name change means you have to add three zeroes. So a "kilo"- byte is one thousand bytes and a megabyte is one million. For giga and tera, add three more zeroes each.

The funny thing is, not one of these prefixes is accurate, in computer-speak. Computers don't use decimal - they use what's called base2, or binary. So, computer numbers don't round off to a thousand or a million. But they're really close. A thousand 24 instead of 1000, and one million 48 thousand instead of an even million. Computer geeks have decided that these binary numbers are close enough to just use the decimal versions of the numbers - to avoid confusing people. Actually, I think it confuses people even more, but - that's the way they decided to do it.

So, if you're so inclined, just remember the four different prefixes and you'll understand a little more about computers. Kilo has three zeroes, Mega has six, Giga, nine and Tera, twelve. It's not much, but it'll hopefully start you down the path of computer understanding.
Stay tuned next week for the second installation, "How Much Memory Do I Have?"
I'm Computer Dave, thanks for your time.