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Unlike people, computers can only understand the binary system. A computer can only know if voltage
is present or not. Binary means two, meaning there is only two numbers, zero and one. Binary is also
known as the base-2 number system. A single digit is known as a bit, short for binary digit. A one
represents that voltage is present in a circuit, a zero represents no current.
Eight bits can be placed together to form a byte.(e.g. 00000000, 00000001, ..., 11111111) These bytes can then be
put together to form words. There is no specific size for a word, it differs from one type of processor
to another. The usual x86 platform has a four byte word, but with the releases of the AMD 64, AMD Opteron,
and Intel Itanium processors, that is shifting to an eight byte word. Many times the terms 32-bit computing
and 64-bit computing are heard. This refers to the wordsize of the machine. Notice 32/8 gives 4 bytes. So a
32-bit machine has a wordsize of 4 bytes, while a 64-bit machine has a wordsize of 8 bytes.
Each digit of a byte represents a multiple of two.
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