Why do storage and memory follow a pattern of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on)?
In: Technology
Because computers operate on binary, because they are digital – they deal in absolutes of a particular electrical line either having power or not having power, and nothing in between.
Take your fingers. Now, if a finger can *only* be up or down, and nothing in between, see what numbers you can get up to. With only two fingers you have both-down, one-up-one-down, one-down-one-up, and both-up. 4 combinations. With 3 fingers there are 8 combinations. With 10 fingers there are 1024 combinations. They’re all powers of 2 because there are only 2 digital states, on and off.
If you have, say, 10 electrical pins addressing a storage device, and they operate in binary, that means you have 1024 possible addresses. If you have 11, that’s 2048.
If you made a 1000-byte storage device, you’d have 24 bytes that you couldn’t access, for no real good reason. And you’d probably need some extra logic or circuitry to refuse access to only those 24-bytes.
Notice, also, that the pattern of your numbering is not even the full answer… you’re already sending and receiving *bytes* (which are 8 binary bits), kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. The choice of the number of those is a power of two just like the number of bits in a byte is a power of two.
If you had analogue computers, it would be different. If you had ternary computers (computers that have 3 states for each connection, i.e. off, half and full), then it would be powers of three (or you’d be wasting some bits, or in this case “trits”).
Your computers and other devices convert everything – even analogue signals like those going over your telephone cable, microphone, video camera, etc. – to digital information in order to process it. As such everything ends up as some power-of-two. That slightly-red colour your webcam picks up is converted to the nearest RGB equivalent and sent as three digital bytes to your computer. Everything gets digitised.
Latest Answers