Bits and Bytes

Welcome, in this video, I will introduce you to the terms bit and byte. 0:00 We will then identify some common prefixes used for larger values and 0:06 what they mean to you. 0:10 You may have a mobile phone or a digital camera that uses very small storage cards. 0:13 This is called a microSD card, and it's small enough to fit on your thumb. 0:18 Ten years ago, you can purchase one of these cards and 0:23 you can take hundreds of high resolution photographs before running out of space. 0:26 Today, you can buy a thumb sized card and take hundreds of thousands of photographs. 0:32 How is this possible? 0:38 To start, let's get a better understanding of bits and bytes. 0:40 A bit is the smallest unit of data or information. 0:47 It is short for binary digit, which means it is either one or zero. 0:52 You can think of this as a light switch in the on or off position or 0:57 the answer to a yes no question as true or false. 1:02 A byte commonly consists of 8 bits. 1:07 Historically, it was used to store a single character like the letter R or 1:12 the number 7. 1:18 We usually refer to a file size in terms of bytes. 1:19 For example, this Python icon is 559 bytes. 1:24 My resume stored as a word processing file is 26,000 bytes. 1:30 The movie Hidden Figures stored on a Blu-ray disk is 1:36 more than 39 billion bytes. 1:41 There is a better way to refer to these large numbers by using different 1:44 prefixes before the word byte. 1:49 For example, kilo means 1,000 or 1 followed by three 0s. 1:51 You may have heard of kilo before. 1:58 A kilogram means 1,000 grams. 2:00 A kilometer or kilometer means 1,000 meters. 2:03 So instead of 26,000 bytes, I would say that my resume is 26 kilobytes. 2:08 Mega means 1 million or 1 followed by six 0s. 2:15 My favorite song stored on a portable music player is 4.7 megabytes. 2:20 Giga means 1 billion, or 1 followed by nine 0s. 2:27 A DVD of Hidden Figures is 39.26 gigabytes. 2:33 There are more prefixes for even larger values. 2:39 The largest widely recognized prefix is yotta. 2:43 A yottabyte is 1 septillion bytes, or 1 followed by 24 0s. 2:47 This is about 45 trillion Blu-ray movie disks or 2:54 1,000 years of worldwide Internet traffic. 2:58 To house 1 yottabyte of data, 3:02 you would need a data center roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. 3:03 Back to that microSD card for your phone. 3:09 Today, you can buy a 256 gigabyte card for the same price 3:11 you would have paid for a 256 megabyte card ten years ago. 3:16 The difference is the card you buy today stores 1,000 times the amount of data. 3:21 In the next video, we will discuss the different types of data you will use when 3:27 writing computer programs. 3:31 Stay tuned. 3:33