Bits and bytes of computer

Hello world,

We discussed in previous article that computer is an electronic device, and it understands electronic signals.

Electronic signals are 0 or 1 which means on or off.

This 0 or 1 or ON/OFF is nothing but one BIT. Which is the smallest unit of computer memory. and group of bits is called as byte. We all know that 8 bit is a byte.

But from where this 8 came from? 🤔

Before answering this question, lets look at your keyboard. Each key sends some unique combinations of bits when we press it. And for each character, digit and symbol there is a specification to represent them in binary world. Which is knows as ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange) it is a way to represent each character in binary.

Now coming back to the original question, why 8 bits are byte. These all available characters, 

            0-9 digit

            A-Z and a-z alphabets

            And special symbols

So these are approximately 127 characters

Let say we have only 1 binary bit 2¹ then we can represent 2 characters 0 or 1

With 2 bits  2² we can represent 4 characters.  Similarly for 127 characters how many bits we will require 2^?     are 127 or more.

which is 7 bits 2⁷ is 128

So the answer is 7 , but  8 bits are one byte, So 1 bit is added for error check which is parity bit.

When we are sending and receiving digital data there are chances of error, so to identify if the data is correctly received,  one bit is added as parity bit.

This is to ensure there should be only even numbers of 1s in the bytes, If data contains even 1s then this bit is 0, else this bit is set to 1.

And 8 bits become 1 byte. 

Thanks for reading, feel free to share this information with your friends.

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