In the beginning there was a bit. A bit can be either on or off.
Then we made bytes. Bytes are typically 8 bits.
Even though we count in bytes the computers we use are still doing everything a word at a time. The word size is based on the number of bits they can use for each operation.
The earliest computers and video game systems could work on one byte at a time and were 8 bit word sizes. Most computers used today are 64 bit.
Here is an idea of the addressing limits for the various word sizes.
- 8 bits = 2^8 = 256
- 16 bit = 2^16 = 65,536
- 24 bits = 16,777,215 bytes (2^24-1 bytes) 16 MB - 65535 times larger than 8 bit
- 31 bit = 2 gigabytes 2,147,483,647 (2 GB) 128 times larger than 16 MB
- 32 bit = 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (4 GB)
- 64 bit = 2^64 = 16 exabytes (EB) 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 = 4 billion times larger than 32 bit = 16 million gigabytes.
An exabyte is slightly more than one billion gigabytes.
A gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (10243 or 230) bytes.
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