What is a bit in computers?

What is a bit in computers?

a “bit” is atomic: the smallest unit of storage. A bit stores just a 0 or 1. “In the computer it’s all 0’s and 1’s” bits. Anything with two separate states can store 1 bit.

Why is binary 8 bit?

Digital Control Systems A binary number can represent an analog voltage. An 8 bit number, for example, represents a decimal number from 0 to 255 (or −128 to +127 if two’s complement representation is used). An 8 bit number could therefore represent a voltage from 0 to 2.55 V, say, with a resolution of 10 mV.

Why do computers use base 8?

Octal was an ideal abbreviation of binary for these machines because their word size is divisible by three (each octal digit represents three binary digits). So two, four, eight or twelve digits could concisely display an entire machine word.

What does bit mean in computer terms?

A bit (short for “binary digit”) is the smallest unit of measurement used to quantify computer data. It contains a single binary value of 0 or 1.

How many bytes in a computer?

On almost all modern computers, a byte is equal to 8 bits. Large amounts of memory are indicated in terms of kilobytes (1,024 bytes), megabytes (1,048,576 bytes), and gigabytes (1,073,741,824 bytes).

How many bits are in a bit?

In computing, bit is the basic unit of information, whereas Byte is a unit of information, which is equal to eight bits. The symbol used to represent bit is “bit” or “b”, while the symbol used to represent a byte is “B”. A bit can represent only two values (0 or 1), whereas a byte can represent 256 (2 8) different values.

What is this computers bit?

A bit is the most basic unit in computer machine language. All instructions that the computer executes and the data that it processes is made up of a group of bits. Bits are represented in many forms either through electrical voltage, current pulses, or by the state of an electronic flip-flop circuit.