let's continue our discussion of Knology digital storage uses the binary system where everything is saved as ones and zeros the word that's used to describe these ones and zeros is a bit it's short for binary digit and it's the smallest unit of data in a computer these bits these ones and zeros are used to store all kinds of information from text documents to the digital photos that you take to the sounds that come out of your speakers to store this information we use a whole bunch of bits put together the number of bits we have determines how much data we can store now for our next term if you take 8 bits 8 of these ones and zeros and you put them together that's called a byte it sounds like a mouthful of food but it's spelled with a y and it refers to eight bits put together you can think of one byte as the amount of space required to store a single letter or symbol in a text document so if you wrote a paragraph with 500 characters that would require about 500 bytes of storage space that brings us to our next term if you take a thousand bytes and put them together that's called a kilobyte often abbreviated as k uppercase B or just K now I will mention just once that there are actually 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte and that's because digital storage uses the binary system and everything is expressed in powers of two that said it's okay to just think of a kilobyte as a thousand bytes similar to how a kilogram is a thousand grams or a kilometer is a thousand meters one kilobyte is enough space to hold about a third of a page of text back in the late 1970s and early 1980s the five and a quarter inch floppy disk was a popular storage medium it could hold 360 kilobytes of information so now what's it called when you have a thousand kilobytes a thousand kilobytes is called a megabyte abbreviated as capital MB one megabyte is enough space to hold about one book one photo or one minute of music keep in mind those are approximations and could vary widely based on quality and type of encoding the three and a half inch floppy disk introduced in the 1980s could hold 1.4 megabytes of data now you may be wondering what's it called when you have a thousand megabytes a thousand megabytes is called a gigabyte abbreviated as capital GB a gigabyte is enough space to hold about a thousand books or a thousand photos or sixteen hours of music by the mid-1990s a 1 gigabyte hard drive could be purchased for a couple hundred dollars nowadays 1 gigabyte is considered very little storage and you could get a 1 gigabyte flash drive SD card or micro SD card for just a couple dollars if you could find one at all so now what's it called when you have a thousand gigabytes a thousand gigabytes is called a terabyte abbreviated as capital TB a terabyte is enough space to hold about a million books which is around 80 school libraries or a million photos or two years of continuous music nowadays a terabyte of storage is readily available as a hard drive solid-state drive or even SD or microSD card so to recap we talked about how there are eight bits in one bite a thousand bytes in one kilobyte a thousand kilobytes in one megabyte a thousand megabytes in one gigabyte and a thousand gigabytes in one terabyte and that's enough to know for everyday usage but for those of you who are curious after terabyte comes petabyte then exabyte then zettabyte then yottabyte thanks for watching I hope you've enjoyed this video and that you have a better understanding of digital storage terminology