How Much Text is in a Kilobyte or Megabyte?  ( தமிழில் )

The word bit is formed from binary digit is a two digit (0 & 1) system and it is different from the Decimal system which contains 10 digits (0 to 9). The name deci is drived from Roman as well as from Indian system (In hindi and urdu 10 is called as dus / thus.

A bit is the most basic unit of information. At their most fundamental level, most modern computers operate on binary a bit which means that they can have two states, usually specified as a 0 or 1. Long strings of these bits can be used to represent most types of information including text, pictures and music.

Most modern computers are binary systems and therefore, they are particularly well suited to working with bits. To help make computers more like our language-based way of thinking, groups of bits are joined into bytes. One byte is comprised of 8 bits. A set of 8 bits was chosen because this provides 256 total possibilities which is sufficient for specifying letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation and other extended characters (ASCII Code).

ASCII Code Examples: 00110000=0, 00110001=1, 00111001=9, 01000001=A, 01100001=a, 00100000=Space

It is estimated that a kilobyte can accommodate about 1/2 of a typewritten page. Therefore, one full page requires about 2 kilobytes. The chart below illustrates the number of bytes in common terms such as kilobyte and megabyte and how much text could be stored :

Name Abbrev n Power of  2 Number of Bytes Amount of text could be stored (Approx)

Kilobyte

(KB)

210

1,024

1/2 page

Megabyte

(MB)

220

1,048,576

500 pages or 1 thick book

Gigabyte

(GB)

230

1,073,741,824

500,000 pages or 1,000 thick books

Terabyte

(TB)

240

1,099,511,627,776

1,000,000 thick books

Petabyte

(PB)

250

1,125,899,906,842,624

180 Libraries of Congress **

Exabyte

(EB)

260

1,152,921,504,606,846,976

180 thousand Libraries of Congress

Zettabyte

(ZB)

270

1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424

180 million Libraries of Congress

Yottabyte

(YB)

280

1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

180 billion Libraries of Congress

**The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. is said to be the world's largest library with over 28 million volumes. The numbers listed in the chart above are based on the assumption that the average book has 200 pages.

Most Compact Discs (CD) can hold approximately 750 megabytes (mB) which i s roughly equivalent to 375,000 pages of text! DVDs can store 4.7 gigabytes (gB) or 2.3 million pages. The next generation of optical media, Blu-Ray discs, can hold an astonishing 27 gigabytes or 13.5 million pages which is roughly equivalent to the text contained in 67,500 books!