Unit of Measurement - Numbering Systems

Units of Measure

-Bit = Binary digit  (smallest unit of measure, either 0 and 1).

Because bits are so small, you rarely work with information one bit at a time. Bits are usually assembled into a group of eight to form a byte. A byte contains enough information to store a single ASCII character, like "h".

-A kilobyte (KB) is 1,024 bytes, not one thousand bytes as might be expected, because computers use binary (base two) math, instead of a decimal (base ten) system.

-Computer storage and memory is often measured in megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB).

A medium-sized novel contains about 1 MB of information.

Numbering Systems

-The technique to represent and work with numbers is called number system.

-Decimal number system is the most common number system.

Other popular number systems include binary number system, octal number system, hexadecimal number system, etc.