How Big is Big?

Megabytes, Gigabytes, Ks, and Gs
Confusing isn't it? The megs and gigs can tongue-tie even the best of us...
Ok, I'm kidding. Tech people live and breath this stuff.

So just for fun I'm going to explain this once and for all --

A - This is a byte (bite). One byte. Any single character takes up a single byte of memory. Got that? That's easy.

Now imagine a page with 1,000 letter Rs on it. This is a kilobyte (kill o bite). The actual number is 1,024 but you can round it off without hurting anyone's feelings. So if I send you a picture of my kid that is 79KB or 79 kilobytes or 79K in size, that's 79,000 bytes. Got that? Make sense?

Now imagine 1,000 pages with 1,000 letter Js on each page. This is a megabyte (meg a bite). That's a huge jump from a kilobyte. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes which is 1,024 bytes, but you can round it off to 1 million bytes if you want. So that 1MB email you are about to open could have a bunch of 79KB pictures inside right? So would you rather open a 79MB picture or a 79KB picture? Yeah, you got that. Have a cookie while we jump to the next level.

Ok, so what if you put those 1,000 pages into a box and then stacked that box with 999 other boxes filled with 1,000 pages each? You would have a gigabyte (gig a bite). That's like a billion letters typed on all those pages! No one will look down on you for rounding it off to a billion even if it is actually 1,025 times 1,024 times 1,024. So your 40GB hard drive doesn't seem so small does it? 40 billion bytes? Small? Are you kidding me?

Well, what if you have 1,024 gigabytes just lying around? Well, my friend. You would be the proud owner of a Terabyte. Sounds like a trillion to me. One Trillion Bytes. Now we're talking some size. If you could travel at the speed of light, dropping a letter every mile along the way, in one second you would drop 186,000 letters or 186KB. In one year you would have dropped 6 terabytes of letters or 6TB. One year of time to go 6 trillion miles. Amazed yet?

Here endeth the lesson.