...have you heard about the exabyte? Our first computer had a 65mb hard drive(and it cost extra for the upgrade!) now we have 60, 80, 120 gig hard drives. When you start talking about internet servers, you will hear about terabytes, or 1,000 or so odd gigabytes. In 1999, the internet generated two exabytes of information. Today, the internet moves an exabyte per hour. An exabyte is 1.074 billion gigabytes. :o So if it takes a few seconds for this page to load, you might want to think about just how much information is flying around out there, clogging up the information superhighway.
Dave
Yes and I just noticed that an exabyte is not a perfect measurement of gigabytes. So, do we have to learn another numerical scale to equate exabytes, terabytes and gigabytes, megabytes, kilobytes and bytes or devise computers to run on something other than binary, or reinstitue one of the other computer numerical systems, Hexadecimal or octal to find one where all of the iterations come out evenly?
Perhaps it could be called a metridecimalhexoctal approximation. :D :D
Actually, I think this theme runs all through the byte system. It is based on 8, rather than ten.
8 bits=1 byte
1024 bytes=1kilobyte
1024 kb=1megabyte
If you look at computer memory, it works as a doubling of an 8 based system. 32megs RAM, then 64, 128, 256, etc. This is why a meg or a gig is never exactly a whole number. I think if you were to break an exabyte down, you would probably find that it is a continuation of the 8,16,32,64 sequence. Maybe a more computer literate person can explain this better than I can, this is why I like base ten math. ;D
Dave
I went fishin earlier and got mega-'bytes' :D
WDH was out in the Deer Flies earlier and said he almost got kilabytes
he almost got kilabytes.
Now, that is good ;D ;D ;D
metridecimalhexoctal
Surely you made that up ???. If not, then I must need to go back to school :P.
Yeah! I made it up. :D
I get carried away with myself sometimes and don't stop running till I'm out in Right field. It's such a good feeling to be joking around that I forget that folks will take me seriously. I mean no harm, it's just that I get a case of the stupids and run off at the mouth.
We had to be fluent in those numbering systems when I was coming up. I never could see why anyone would use them when we had 10 fingers. If it weren't for computers, I guess we wouldn't.
All this talk about Metric and gallons made me remember how confusing it was.
Y'all are a lot smarter than I am. I wasn't raised in computers and was 26 before I was seriously introduced to them.
Hex was the most commonly used by IBM, RCA and the other big business computer companys. It allowed a binary number to be large because it expanded the iterations.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F Then the next set 10 12 13---1D 1E 1F You can see that a large decimal number equivelant can be reached with the use of fewer places. It also fit the byte configuration of the storage. When I was programming in Machine language or BAL it all made sense to me. Now It's just a blur. The RPG, COBOL, NEAT and Fortran were in the real world and you could count on your fingers again, as long as you understood the underlying system.
GE used Octal for some reason. I never understood why.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 then 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 20
They were trying to come up with a way of keeping track of binary on 3 bit boundaries.
This link explains it better if you are interested:http://www.danbbs.dk/~erikoest/octal.htm
So, everytime someone suggests that I "think" in metric, I come back to how confused I would be if we did business in Hex with the excuse that it would save ink. :D
it's not a base of 8, it's a base of 2, binary.
you have
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
.
.
.
is that 1074 a typo? where did that come from?
you're making my head hurt and giving me flashbacks to college, Tom. I think i'll have a beer to round out the memory. well, actually, i'd have to have a bunch, but i'm smart enough to know it will give me a headache in the morning. so i'll just have a scotch and go to bed!
The 1.074 billion is from an article, I believe from AP. As I mentioned earlier, it was going to take someone a little more computer literate than me to come to terms with this. I didn't realize it was a binary system, we just started at 8, as that was a byte.
Dave
yeah, the 8 is 2^3 (2 to the 3rd power).
And was a byte = three bits, each bit being either on/off, +/-, up/down, or a 1 or 0?
The three bits make up the octal (some might call base 8 ) numbers 0-7. That is what I recall, anyway. Those days in the late 60's of rebooting the mainframe using numbers 0-7 are fading away.. ;D
Yes a byte is made of bits and a bit is binary switch that is either on or off or 1 or 0. A byte is composed of 8 bits, or two 4 bit half bytes. The half byte is all that is required to record a Hex number from 0-F. A full byte is required to record an alphameric character. Since the numeric equivelant would take two places. A byte is capable of recording FF one F in each half byte.
FF has a decimal equivelant of 255 so you can see that it is easy for a byte to represent, not only each character of the alphabet, but special punctuation and even colors.
Scratch scratch. Somewhere in the back of my head is a note that says that there is an extra bit on a byte. The reason is that you are only allowed to have an odd number of bits turned on. So a Zero has the odd bit on and a one has it off. It doesn't add to anything, its purpose is a failsafe to insure that a mechanical/electo failure hasn't occurred and you dropped a bit. I have forgotten how this works exactly. It is called a parity bit.
Hollerith code was transferred to the byte configuration in the computer and it couldn't use the pure numeric configuration. It divided the alphabet into two parts and denoted which was being recorded by turning on a zone bit. There were 128 characters that could be represented in a byte when this configuration was being used.
I'm getting awfully confused.
Looks like I need to go find some old books if I want to drag this out of my head again. :D
It's fun though. ;D
Tom,
I think a two bytes make a word, but then I am remembering that from the deep foggy packets of the brain.
I thought 4 bytes made a dollar ???.
nope , $0.50
2 bytes (bits ) is a quarter , a bit is a old coin worth 12.5 cents
:P
james
2 bytes,
4 bytes,
6 bytes,
a dollar,
all for metric,
stand up and holler.
8)
very funny, thurlow, har har :D
the reason that computers work in binary has to do with how the electronics work. a transistor is either on or off, on is a 1 off is a zero. put a bunch of transisters together and you can do some crazy processing.
The real question here is how many bytes to the middle of one of those heart-attack burgers the Wisconsin boys are always talking about.
Dave
I thought a shave and a haircut was 2 bits. :-\
A hamburger was one. :P
Shave and a haircut . . . . ten cents.
Two bytes makes one mouthfull and 20 bytes makes one full. Just leave room for pie.
Talking about computers makes me hungry. 8)