I exist in concrete terms. Take my garden for example. Each May I drop squash seeds in the tilled soil. I add water. A week later healthy green shoots sprout from the ground.
As fate would have it, though, I am just an analog gal married to a digital man–a man who can relate to bits moving through the ether and the compression of terabytes of data in milliseconds.
In our 18 years of marriage my husband, Frank, has come way over toward the analog world. He tills my garden. In return I have learned that a bit is more than a cork screwy thing on a power drill and a byte is more than the last tiny piece of chocolate cake. I am on a journey to meet Frank in the ether world.
Ten years ago Frank and I started Gamewood Data Systems. I thought up the name while he wrote code for a dialysis laboratory program. Then, in 1994 we started a local internet access for Southside Virginia.
Last summer, at exactly the same time that Frank was working with Sprint to install new internet lines, 30 guinea keets that I’d ordered arrived. (Did I mention that I’m a chicken farmer, too?)
The guinea keets had to be inside under a heat lamp for 2 weeks, so they stayed in a wire and wood cage in the room adjacent to some of the internet equipment. Since the tech folks walked by my chirping guineas to get to the internet computers, I put a sign on the cage…”micro chicks?” It sounded technical, but I really didn’t know what I was talking about.
But, it’s time to learn to live in this new e-world. Bit by bit I am on my way to being digital, so I decided to start with “micro chicks.”
The “micro chicks” in my computer, Frank tells me, process and store information in binary code. This is because the binary system uses only two values, 0 and 1.
In the electrical circuit of a microchip the binary number system fits right in because it can be converted to “on” and “off”. Zero (0) would be an “off” or non-pulse signal and one (1) would be an “on” or pulse signal.
Each binary digit is nicknamed a “bit”– a shortened form of Binary digIT. A group of 4 binary digits is just a “nibble.” A group of 8 binary code digits is equal to one whole byte. Each byte can represent a unique character such as a lower case letter of the alphabet.
Now, all this is a bit complicated for me, but I have mastered the 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon idea, so surely I can remember 8 bits in a byte, one byte to a character.
Why is it that it takes exactly 8 bits to make 1 byte which represents 1 character?
Well, each bit is either 0 or 1. If each bit in the group of 8 can have 2 possible values, then in a unique group of 8 there can be 2 to the eighth power ( 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2)or 256 unique combinations.
256 characters is enough to represent all the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case, the 10 digits in our more familiar decimal number system (0-9), and a variety of other signs and symbols that you find on the keyboard such as the ampersand (&) or the dollar sign($).
One thing that computer programmers and I completely agree on is that you must have shortcuts in life. For example, every school night I watch the clock and at 8:30 I say to the children “bedtime.” “Bedtime” saves me a heap of trouble since otherwise I would have to say, “I see the little hand is just past the 8 and the big hand is on the 6, so Emma and Cabell it is time for you to get on your pajamas, brush your teeth and hop into bed.”
The shortcut for the computer is the ASCII code. The ASCII code (American Standardized Code for Information Interchange) is accepted as the standard for converting an individual character to a number which can be represented in binary code.
The first 32 values of the ASCII code are numbers which represent keyboard functions such as “tab” or “shift”. The upper case and lower case letters of the alphabet would likewise have a permanent numerical assignment among the 256 unique combinations. An example accepted by all computer programmers would be that the binary number 01000001 is equal to 65 in the decimal system and equal to the “A” character in the ASCII code nomenclature. The computer would know that every time it sees a byte that is made up of the bit combination that looks like 01000001 it will be an “A”.
When computer folks talk about data storage or memory capacity of a computer they use words like kilobytes or megabytes or gigabytes. One kilobyte is about 1000 bytes or a thousand characters, one megabyte is close to one million characters and a gigabyte is around one billion characters. There are prefixes that go right on up to tera- or trillions and beyond.
Bits and bytes are not only units of measure for stored data or characters, but are also the units of measure for speed.
How fast can those bits, those binary code signals that add up in groups of 8 to represent a single character, move along a telephone or data line? Five years ago a typical “fast” modem might allow bits to travel at a rate of 14,400 bits per second. (The bits per second rate is called the baud rate.) Today 56,000 bits per second is typical and newer digital modems move the data at rates hundreds of times faster than that.
I am learning a lot.
Next summer when the guinea chicks arrive their cage will be hardwired and old, but the sign will be new. “16 bitties = 2 bytes!” it will say with an exclamation point consistent with my level of technical confidence.
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