3.2.2 Outline the meaning of the terms bit (b) and byte (B) and their
derivatives.
Teaching Note:
Students must understand that everything in a computer is held and
processed in binary, hence the relation between bits, bytes and so on
in powers of 2. For example 1 kilobyte = 2^10. They should be familiar
with the prefixes T, G, M, k and their use in computer science
measure. They must be able to apply the prefixes T, G, M and k to
bits and bytes. For example TB (terabytes), Gb (gigabits), MB
(megabytes).
JSR Notes:
"Bit" comes from "binary digit", and the derivative of "byte" (b) is "binary term". And note that a byte is almost always 8 bits, but not necessarily so. An example of non 8-bit bytes is 9-bit bytes that use the 9th bit for parity checking - more on this later.
From the teaching notes, be careful when converting a bit amount to a byte amount or vice versa. 1 MB, for example, contains approximately 8 million bits.
And do make sure you can properly convert between the different prefixes - often I'm astounded that students can't do this. For example, approximately how many kB are in a GB? Well, a kB is around 1000, and a GB is around a billion, and so, 1000 divided into a billion is approximately a million.