Quote:
narf poit chez BOOM said:
Plus, transistors.
2->4->8
Or, that's my guess, although I know very little about hardware architecture.
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Ultimately, it grew out of using electrical current to fuel memory. Magnetism could be used as well, but we'll stick with the electricity. A "bit" represents the smallest form of memory available, which is 0 (zero current) and 1 (non-zero current). If there was any measurable current, the value was ON or 1 or TRUE, depending on what you wanted to call it.
Things just got more complex from there. Because bits have 2 possible values, things just double in size as they progress. This is why if you look at the amount of actual bytes in a memory stick is never exactly what they advertise. If you measure things in binary terms, a kilobit is actually 1024 bits (2^10).
With a little math, one will find that a 512 megabit stick of RAM contains 536,870,912 bits of storage (actually, I stole the number from Wikipedia so there.
) That IS a power of 2.
At this point, I'm going to quit because delving into how memory works and all that funny computer architecture crap is weird and sort of makes your brain snap in half. I hate thinking about it so I'm not going to type about it. That gets into memory addresses and, as a silly little human organic brain owner, I have trouble thinking about ways to organize half a billion bits. Computers do it nicely, though.