The binary number system and the character
Measuring the size of information

The size of computer storage is generally measured in bytes. Although characters are stored in bytes, a few bytes are of little use for storing a large amount of data. Therefore, storage is measured in larger increments of bytes.

For example, the term Kilobyte (KB) in 512KB refers to thousands of bytes. The table below illustrates binary data size measurements:

To simplify the storage measurements, the above examples are commonly referred to as an even 1,000 for a Kilobyte, an even 1,000,000 for a Megabyte, and so forth. With current programs being so large, PCs need to be able to hold billions of bytes or Gigabytes of information.

• It is important to understand that although the terms 'bytes' and 'characters' are often used interchangeably, a 'byte' can used to store a binary representation of a character, whereas a 'character' cannot store a byte.