Memory

Memory

What's with all this byte business?

You can't work with computers long without coming across terms such as kilobyte, megabyte, etc. A byte is simply a unit of measurement of memory. One byte is equivalent to one keyboard character. A string of electric pulses (on's and off's) represented by 1's and 0's. 8 bits = 1 byte. The prefix indicates the number of bytes.

1 Kilobyte (kb)= 1000 bytes

1 Megabyte (Mb)= 1000 kilobytes

1 Gigabyte (Gb)= 1000 megabytes

1 Terabyte = (Tb)1000 gigabytes ?????

A one page typed document is about 130 KB.
A typical high density floppy disk can hold about 1.4 megabytes or 1400 KB.
A typical double density floppy disk can hold about 800 KB.
A Zip disk can hold about 100 megabytes.
A hard drive in a typical computer is between 6-20 gigabytes.
A typical computer has about 64 megabytes of RAM

*Remember: you can check the size of a file by clicking once on a file icon, going to "File" and choosing "Get info."

Web Page by Steve Christensen - Rev. 4/08