Why are 8 and 256 such important numbers in computer sciences?

Question

I don\'t know very well about RAM and HDD architecture, or how electronics deals with chunks of memory, but this always triggered my curiosity: Why did we choose to stop at 8 bi

Answer 1

Computers are build upon digital electronics, and digital electronics works with states. One fragment can have 2 states, 1 or 0 (if the voltage is above some level then it is 1, if not then it is zero). To represent that behavior binary system was introduced (well not introduced but widely accepted).

So we come to the bit. Bit is the smallest fragment in binary system. It can take only 2 states, 1 or 0, and it represents the atomic fragment of the whole system.

To make our lives easy the byte (8 bits) was introduced. To give u some analogy we don't express weight in grams, but that is the base measure of weight, but we use kilograms, because it is easier to use and to understand the use. One kilogram is the 1000 grams, and that can be expressed as 10 on the power of 3. So when we go back to the binary system and we use the same power we get 8 ( 2 on the power of 3 is 8). That was done because the use of only bits was overly complicated in every day computing.

That held on, so further in the future when we realized that 8 bytes was again too small and becoming complicated to use we added +1 on the power ( 2 on the power of 4 is 16), and then again 2^5 is 32, and so on and the 256 is just 2 on the power of 8.

So your answer is we follow the binary system because of architecture of computers, and we go up in the value of the power to represent get some values that we can simply handle every day, and that is how you got from a bit to an byte (8 bits) and so on!

(2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and so on) (2^x, x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and so on)