Bits vs Bytes as Fast As Possible

Computer data is often referred to in bits or bytes. Watch this video and you'll understand what they do and how they differ!

[recedingant]

its crazy to see how far tech quickie has come in the past years

[shmadul]

Anyone else try to wipe the spec of dust off your screen 😝

[CCCSSacramento]

Linus, I'm a high school teacher teaching an A+ Certification class, and your videos have been instrumental in teaching my students! Thank you so so much for them!!

[mygrandfatherkilledhitler]

Bit
Byte
Kilobyte
Megabyte
Gigabyte
Terabyte
Petabyte
Exabyte
Zettabyte
Yottabyte
Brontobyte
Geopbyte

[Saiyukimot]

VERY APPROXIMATE; NOT CORRECT.

Loved it.

[jcninety]

This is by far my favourite Fast As Possible so far. Great script, great presentation and really clear, concise content. Awesome!

[techquickie]

Heh I guess my casual conversations are different from yours :p

[elaax]

Here's your calculation for internet speed, if the ISP says for example, you have a package which has 25MB/s
you just multiply the number with 1024, so in this case 25 x 1024 = 25.600, then just divide that number with 8.
The answer should be your top speed in this case 25600 / 8 = 3.200, so it would be about 3.2MB/s 'real' download speed.
In many cases the calculation was really accurate.

[vwestlife]

Computers have used 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte ever since they were invented, because computers count in binary (powers of 2), not decimal (powers of 10). It is only a few recent versions of Linux and Mac OS that have decided to change it to 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte.

[majikulone]

Oh Brother how you have grown into your frame, I love coming back to these old videos, to see the evolution...good stuff

[the_spkr]

Actually the amount of bits needed to store a single character depends on the encoding of the text.
ASCII was 7-bit long in its early times, BCD was 6.
UTF-16 uses 16 bits, UTF-32... well that's obvious.
Also, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are of variable width, but that's a longer story.

[theendofit]

side note half a byte is a nibble. serusly no joke

[megaspeed]

1gigabit in an exact conversion is equal to 125MBytes, if you have data in bits just divide it by 8 and you will get the EXACT conversion to megabytes. the reason people use dividing by 10 is because its easy to divide by 10 and its pretty close, enough for an aproximation :)

[techquickie]

Already read the trilogy. Burned through them in like 4 days while I was on vacation a couple years ago. So good.

[gavincampbell]

There are 8 bits to a Byte. He said to work out the speed of something (usually given in Megabits/second) in MegaBytes/second, you divide the Megabits speed by 10 to get an approximate MegaBytes speed. His example was 100Mb(its)/s would be roughly 10MB(ytes)/s, when it's closer to 12MB/s. You would only really need to use this to guesstimate how long a file (given in Bytes) would take to transfer at a known speed (given in bits/second). Hope that helped.

[gasturbat]

I always got confused when it came to bytes and bits, but now I understand better. Probably the most helpful techquickie for enthusiasts yet!

[vwestlife]

It is physically impossible to manufacture RAM in multiples of 1000 bytes. It has to be made in binary multiples. So therefore it makes perfect sense for the prefixes to be binary as well. Otherwise the Commodore 64 would have to be called the "Commodore 65.536"!

[matthewzuber]

"VERY APPROXIMATE!!"
thanks for clearing that up hahaha

[Razear]

Very informative video. You explained it way better than my computer engineering/science teacher in my high school.

[WildoBallenilla]

I love your videos, thank you for explaining these concepts better than my IT training program!