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read the transcript!
meet the byte
You might have heard that a computer’s memory is a series of bits (Os and 1s)…
010100110101010110110111
but you only access them in groups of 8 bits - a byte!
01010011 1010101 10110111
2 ways to think about a byte
8 bits
an integer from 0 to 255
00000000
= 0
00000001
(8 bits!) = 1
(integer!)
00000010
= 2
01011001
= 89
you can’t just access 1 bit
Every byte in your computer’s memory has an address.
If you want to fetch 1 bit, you need to fetch the whole byte at that address and then extract the bit.
some things that are 1 byte
- the boolean
true
(in C)00000001
- the ASCII character F
01000110
- the red part of the colour
#FF00FF
11111111
most things are more than one byte
- integers and floats are Usually 4 bytes or 8 bytes
- strings are LOTS of bytes (for example, in UTF-8 a heart emoji is 3 bytes)
bytes weren’t always 8 bits
In the past, people experimented with lots of different byte sizes (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 bits!)
But now we’ve standardized on 8 bits pretty much everywhere.
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