Nerd Alert: Bits and Bytes. And Nibbles?

The smallest unit of information in computing systems is a binary digit, or bit. A bit can convey either a 1 or a 0; think of a bit as a switch that can be on or off. A grouping of 8 bits is called a byte. A grouping of 4 bits? A nibble (its true), though this term is uncommon.

Binary Numeric Systems
With enough bits, all numbers can be represented. Here are all the numbers that can be represented with a nibble (or 4 bits):

0000 = 0 0001 = 1 0010 = 2 0011 = 3 0100 = 4 0101 = 5 0110 = 6 0111 = 7

1000 = 8 1001 = 9 1010 = 10 1011 = 11 1100 = 12 1101 = 13 1110 = 14 1111 = 15

ASCII
As computers can only understand binary numbers, each character of the alphabet can be represented with a byte of information, using an assigned code. With one byte, there are 256 possible characters. 26 for lower case letters, 26 for uppercase letters, with plenty left over for punctuation and other characters. This is based on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). In binary, the word "binary" would be represented this way:
01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001

Computers do a lot of translating behind the scenes that often gets taken for granted. And this is just to render characters, the amount of computation that occurs to edit audio is astounding.

Disk Storage Hierarchy

8 Bits = 1 Byte 1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte

1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte 1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte 1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte (I'm sure that before long this term will be commonplace)

From web comic XKCD (http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/1_to_10.png)