5. Bits and Bytes

When you are using a computer you are probably opening documents, sending emails, checking web pages etc. All of these items are made up of data.

Your computer needs to be able to read this data so that it can respond to your requests e.g. making a word bold, sending a document to print.

But, the computer doesn't understand the words on the page. It can only deal with binary data - yes, you knew those maths lessons would come in useful some time!

Binary data consists of just two values, 0 and 1.

So, the smallest piece of data that can be stored is called a 'bit' and that is either a 0 or a 1. The term 'bit' comes from 'binary digit'

However, a bit is just that weeny bit too small for even the computer to deal with. So, it usually deals with 8 bits at a time.

8 bits of data are called a 'byte'

One keyboard letter, for example, 'a' or 'd' is one byte in size. So a page which contains 100 letters would be 100 bytes in size.