February 21, 2023, 12:06 pm | Read time: 5 minutes
In everyday life, we often encounter the terms megabit and mega- or even gigabyte and terabyte. These trace back to the units bit and byte.
Bits and bytes are units used to measure the amount of data stored in a file. Today, they are likely known to most people as larger units in the form of megabits and megabytes. Although the terms sound very similar, they represent two very different things. TECHBOOK explains the difference.
Overview
Here is the explanation in the video:
The Difference Between Bit and Byte
A bit is the smallest unit of data–it consists of just a binary number, either 0 or 1. A bit represents the smallest change in a computer system, indicating whether there is an electrical charge or not. A byte, on the other hand, is made up of eight bits and can store a much larger amount of data than a single bit.
The difference between a byte and a bit can be compared to the difference between a single-digit and a multi-digit number. A 3 is single-digit, while 435 is three-digit. A bit is thus single-digit–0 or 1–while a byte consists of eight digits.
But how much data can bits and bytes contain? As mentioned, a bit can only store a binary number–one of two values. 0 and 1 correspond to the states on or off. Two bits can already contain four different values: 00, 01, 10, and 11. With three bits, there are already 16, and with each step, the values double. When you reach eight bits, they are combined into a byte. A byte can now contain 256 different values.
Historically, 8 bits are needed to represent a single text character, which is why this unit has become the standard for a byte. A bit is thus the smallest unit of information and storage, while a byte is the smallest amount of data and is therefore used to describe the available space on a storage medium. For transmission, the term “bit per second” is used because bytes are always sent bit by bit over the internet. For managing storage, however, bytes are more suitable.
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Where Do the Terms Bit and Byte Come From?
The word “bit” is quite simple to explain–it is merely a portmanteau of “binary digit.” However, there are several theories about the origin of the word “byte.” The most common is that the German-American computer scientist Werner Buchholz coined the term. During the development of an IBM computer in 1956, there were several references in the machine instructions that contained 6 binary digits–or 6 bits. To simplify the instructions, Buchholz combined these into a “byte.” This is a deliberate misspelling of the English “bite” to avoid confusion with “bit.”
Another possible origin of the word goes back to Louis G. Dooley. In a letter to the computer magazine “Byte” in 1996, he wrote that the term was coined in a research project at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957. The researchers used the word “byte” to denote a group of “bits.” The number of bits was irrelevant, but it usually referred to 4 bits.
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What Are Megabytes and Megabits?
As mentioned earlier, the term byte is used to indicate the size of files and storage media. With technological progress, file sizes have also increased. We generally specify storage sizes as megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. This corresponds to 1 million bytes, 1 billion bytes, and 1 trillion bytes.
Nowadays, even photos taken with a smartphone are several MB, and text files are several kB in size, so files in the byte range hardly appear in the everyday life of the average PC user. Megabytes and the next larger unit, gigabytes (1 GB = 1,024 MB), are more present than ever. Whether it’s the data volume on a smartphone, the download size of games, or the storage capacity of hard drives–in all these cases, we talk about bytes, or megabytes, gigabytes, and even terabytes.
Similarly, the same gradation is used for transmission speeds. Bits, megabits, and even gigabits are often used in data transmission and information processing. In everyday life, internet users usually encounter bits in connection with DSL or mobile data. We often specify the speed of internet transmission in megabits. For example, if you have a connection with 500 megabits per second (Mbit/s), you can transfer 62.5 megabytes per second.
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How Do I Convert Mbit/s to MB/s?
Very few people can make sense of megabits per second, so converting to megabytes per second is quite useful. Since a byte consists of eight bits, this is not too difficult. Simply divide the internet speed (e.g., 100 Mbit/s) by eight, and you have determined the maximum data amount in megabytes that the connection can download at optimal speed. In this example, that would be a maximum of 12.5 megabytes per second.