Imagine you’re strolling through your town’s library.  There are books and magazines, all made up of millions of individual pages.  The pages themselves are made up of billions of letters, numbers and other characters.  Now imagine scrolling through a digital library, like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.  Each book is still made of pages, each page of characters, but instead of ink and paper, these books are made up of bytes. Each byte is equal to approximately one print character, and together they form the digital books that we read.  In fact, bytes are the measuring tool we use to determine the size of all computer programs.  It’s the smallest building block of this digital world.

Therefore, computer science uses the following measurements:

• Byte – (b) – approximately 1 letter or character.
• Kilobytes (kb) – 1, 024 bytes. Only used for very small files. Some small image files, like icons, are measured in kb.
• Megabytes (mb) – 1,024 kilobytes. Many documents, small videos and normal sized images are measured in megabytes
• Gigabyte – (gb) – 1,024 megabytes. Used for large files, like longer videos and movies. Some smaller devices like smartphones and tablets may have storage capacity measured in gigabytes.
• Terabyte – (tb) – 1,024 gigabytes. Used for extremely large files like databases and archives. Also used for storage capacity of most computers.

When it comes to sending these files from one place to another, we measure the speed in bytes per second. Computer processing power and storage capacity are also measured this way.  So, for example, if you see an advertisement for a computer with 1TB storage capacity, you’ll know that it has one terabyte of space.  With that much space, you’ll be able to save all your documents, pictures, movies and have space for much more.

Buying internet services works much the same way.  The speed that you can connect to the internet is measured in megabytes (MB) per second, or in some cases, terabytes (TB) per second.

Understanding these measurements allows you to understand digital realm, and enable you to make savvy choices about your tech needs and usage.