Q. Smallest unit of information on a machine?
Short for the binary digit the smallest unit of information on a machine. This term was first used in 1946 by the John Tukey, a leading adviser and statistician to five presidents. A single bit is able to hold only one of two values: 0 or 1. Additionally meaningful information is obtained by combining consecutive bits into larger units. For illustration, a byte is composed of 8 consecutive bits.
The Computers are sometimes classified by the number of bits they can process at one time or by the number of bits they use to represent addresses and these two values are not always the same, which leads to confusion. For illustration, classifying a computer as a 32-bit machine might mean that its data registers are 32 bits wide or that it uses 32 bits to identify each address in memory. While larger registers make a computer faster, using more bits for addresses enables a machine to support larger programs.
The Graphics are also often illustrated by the number of bits used to represent each dot and a 1-bit image is monochrome; an 8-bit image supports 256 colors or grayscales and a 24- or 32-bit graphic supports true color.
- 1 byte = 8 bits
- 1 kilobyte (K / KB) = 2^10 bytes = 1,024 bytes
- 1 megabyte (M / MB) = 2^20 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes
- 1 gigabyte (G / GB) = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
- 1 terabyte (T / TB) = 2^40 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
- 1 petabyte (P / PB) = 2^50 bytes = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes
- 1 exabyte (E / EB) = 2^60 bytes = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes
The smallest "unit" of a data on a binary computer is a single bit. Illustration includes zero or one, true or false, on or off, male or female, and right or wrong. Though, you are not limited to representing binary data types (that is, those objects which have only two distinct values).
If you use a bit to symbolize a boolean (true/false) value then that bit (by your definition) represents true or false, for the bit to have any true meaning, you must be consistent.