What is kilobytes and megabytes? The text is nice with a small data capacity. by 天風

This is 天風（Amakaze）. Computers require a way of thinking about memory in terms of data capacity. Up until now, there have been various digital media such as blogs, audio media, and images, but the mainstream these days is definitely video distribution. Videos contain a lot of information, and a picture is worth a thousand words, so you can get a lot of information at a glance. On the other hand, there are restrictions on data capacity, and a single video can be a huge amount of data, hundreds of megabytes. Even if the computer itself has terabytes (1 million times 1 megabyte), if you record and save many videos, the memory capacity will naturally decrease. However, if it is a text file containing only text, it can often only take a few kilobytes (1/1000 of a megabyte).

Here, let's review part-time jobs. 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes, 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes, 1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes. By the way, the reason for 1024 instead of 1000 is that computers represent data using only binary numbers, 0 and 1. Therefore, it is easier for a computer to handle a data capacity that is some power of 2. Multiplying 2 to the 10th power, or 2 10 times, gives 1024. There is a famous question about how many times it would take to fold a 1mm piece of paper to cross Mt. Fuji, and the answer was 22 times. It might be interesting to calculate this yourself. The power of 2 is said to increase exponentially, and if you multiply it by 2 100 or 1000 times, it becomes an astronomical number. Regarding cryptography, which is the security of computers, this idea called "exponential" is now mainstream, and an exponential number of cipher digits has been realized.