Bits and Bytes

转载stanford——cs101

Bits and Bytes

At the smallest scale in the computer, information is stored as bits and bytes. In this section, we'll look at how that works.

Bit

• Bit, like an atom, 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
•  -Nick's tennis racket example
• Chip uses areas of electric charge as 0/1 states
• Hard drive uses spots North/South magnetism 0/1 states
• A bit is too small to be much use
• Group 8 bits together to make 1 byte

Everything in a computer is 0's and 1's ... what does that mean? The bit stores just a 0 or 1 .. it's the smallest building block of storage.

Byte

• One byte = grouping of 8 bits
• e.g. 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0
• One byte can store one letter, e.g. 'A' or 'x'

How Many Patterns With N Bits?

How many distinct patterns can be made with 1, 2, or 3 bits?

• 3 bits vs. 2 bits
• Consider just the leftmost bit
• It can only be 0 or 1
• Lefmost bit is 0, then append 2-bit patterns
• Leftmost bit is 1, then append 2-bit patterns again
• Result ... 3-bits has twice as many patterns as 2-bits

• In general: add 1 bit, double the number of patterns
• 1 bit - 2 patterns
• 2 bits - 4
• 3 bits - 8
• 4 bits - 16
• 5 bits - 32
• 6 bits - 64
• 7 bits - 128
• 8 bits - 256 - one byte
• Mathematically: n bits yields 2ⁿ patterns (2 to the nth power)

One Byte - 256 Patterns

• 1 byte is group of 8 bits
• 8 bits can make 256 different patterns
• How to use the 256 patterns?
• How to store a number in a byte?
• Start with 0, go up, one pattern per number, until run out of patterns
• 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... 254, 255
• One byte can hold a number between 0 and 255
• i.e. with 256 distinct patterns, we can store a number in the range 0..255
• Code: pixel.setRed(n) took a number 0..255. Why?
• The red/green/blue image numbers are each stored in one byte

Bytes

• "Byte" - unit of information storage
• A document, an image, a movie .. how many bytes?
• 1 byte is enough to hold 1 typed letter, e.g. 'b' or 'X'
• Later we'll look at storage in: RAM, hard drives, flash drives
• All measured in bytes, despite being very different hardware
• Kilobyte, KB, about 1 thousand bytes
• Megabyte, MB, about 1 million bytes
• Gigabyte, GB, about 1 billion bytes
• Terabyte, TB, about 1 trillion bytes (rare)

The space that data takes up in the computer is measured in by the "byte". One byte is big enough to hold a single typed letter, like 'a'. Here we'll look at storing data in RAM memory and in persistent storage like a hard drive. All of that storage space will be measured in bytes. We'll look at byte arithmetic in more detail later.

Bytes and Letters - ASCII Code

• ASCII is an encoding representing each typed letter by a number
• Each number is stored in one byte (so the number is in 0..255)
• A is 65
• B is 66
• a is 96
• space is 32
• "Unicode" is an encoding for mandarin, greek, arabic, etc. languages, typically 2-bytes per "letter"

32 space
33 !
34 "
35 #
36 $
37 %
38 &
39 '
40 (
41 )
42 *
43 +
44 ,
45 -
46 .
47 /
48 0
49 1
50 2
51 3
52 4
53 5
54 6
55 7
56 8
57 9
58 :
59 ;
60 <
61 =
62 >
63 ?
64 @

65 A
66 B
67 C
68 D
69 E
70 F
71 G
72 H
73 I
74 J
75 K
76 L
77 M
78 N
79 O
80 P
81 Q
82 R
83 S
84 T
85 U
86 V
87 W
88 X
89 Y
90 Z
91 [
92 \
93 ]
94 ^
95 _
96 `

97 a
98 b
99 c
100 d
101 e
102 f
103 g
104 h
105 i
106 j
107 k
108 l
109 m
110 n
111 o
112 p
113 q
114 r
115 s
116 t
117 u
118 v
119 w
120 x
121 y
122 z
123 {
124 |
125 }
126 ~

Typing, Bytes, and You

• An example of bytes in your daily life
• When you type letters on your phone or computer
• Each letter is stored in a byte, as below
• 100 typed letters takes up 100 bytes
• When you send, say, a text message, the numbers are sent
• Text is quite compact, using few bytes, compared to images etc.