The need to measure information has become acute when humanity has come to grips with the automation of the computation process. In the middle of the last century, the sciences related to information processing appeared, then the foundations of modern division of it into portions arose. In 1948, the name of the minimum piece of information was given, which is now accepted everywhere.
To measure the amount of computer information, units called "bits" and "bytes" are used. A bit is the smallest possible unit that can contain information about only two values of the measured variable - "yes" or "no", 0 or 1, on or off, etc.
Processors used in computers process data sequentially, chunk by chunk. But feeding each successive portion into them takes more time than processing it, therefore, to speed up the process, data is supplied in sets of eight bits of information. A portion of this size is called a byte. These units - bytes - measure the size of files, the capacity of hard and optical disks, flash drives and other storage media. They are also used in derived units that show, for example, the speed of data transmission over computer networks.
In the SI metric system adopted in most countries, standard prefixes are applied to bytes, indicating their multiplicity of one thousand units. So 1 kilobyte means 1000 bytes, 1 megabyte equals one million bytes, etc. The same prefixes can be applied to bits, it is important not to get confused - 1 kilobit is eight times less than 1 kilobyte, as well as 1 megabit is as much less than 1 megabyte.
Some confusion is associated with the binary nature of the minimum unit of information today, since the set of prefixes used in the SI system is designed for the decimal system. Therefore, for example, on a flash card in accordance with the rules of the SI system, a capacity of 1 gigabyte is indicated, but in fact it contains less information. To avoid this, the International Electrotechnical Commission, back in 1999, introduced other prefixes to denote the multiplicity of bytes. Instead of the prefix "kilo", "kibi" should be used - 1 kibibyte is equal to 2¹⁰ = 1024 bytes. There are similar replacements for megabyte (mebibyte), gigabyte (gibibyte), etc. However, such a system of designating information units has not yet received widespread distribution.
