Section: The Bit and its offspring...
...Subsection: The Byte

While the bit is undoubtedly important, it can only hold two possible values, 1 and 0. In order to represent anything more complex than the simplest binary values, we have to combine bits. Eight bits are combined into a unit called a byte. Each bit represents one digit of binary notation. If we put eight of these binary digits together we can represent any number from 0 to 255. Zero would be represented by 00000000 in binary, or all eight bits turned off. If all the bits were on, the largest possible value would be 11111111 binary, which translates to 255 decimal. This is a large enough value to be useful. For example, all the values of the ASCII character set can be represented in one byte. (This is not a coincidence!)

Q. 1

I recently came across an Internet message which claimed that much of the Internet was a conspiracy by big business. One of the author's more interesting theories was that a certain kind of address information called the ip address was limited to a maximum value of 255 rather than 999 deliberately to reduce the supply of addresses and thus make them more valuable. It is true that these addresses have a maximum value of 255. Can you think of another reason this could be the case?

Q. 2

Many computer monitors are capable of displaying 256 colors at a time. Why this number?

Why isn't it 255?

Q. 3

If you had a document that was 500 bytes long and saved in ASCII format, about how many characters long would the document be?