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In programming you generally use binary (base 2), hexadecimal (base 16), and decimal (base 10), depending on the task.

I haven't seen anybody using octal (base 8 ) at all. Maybe what you are referring to is simply that a byte is 8 bits.

A bit is a single 0 or 1. Which you can think of in a primitive machine as literally telling the machine that a certain switch should be flipped on or off.

As oops said, a byte is the smallest unit of memory large enough to store an individual character. They could make bytes 10 bits instead of 8 in order for calculations to be easier for us as humans, but that would be a huge waste of storage space.



Maybe the 8 vs 10 thing you're talking about is about the difference between conventions for prefixes regarding memory size. In most scientific fields Kilo means 1000, Mega 1 million, Giga 1 billion, etc. But with computing KB can mean both 1000 (10^3) bytes and 1024 (2^10) bytes. Windows uses 1024 while the Hard Drive companies use 1000. That's why your 1 TB (10^12 bytes) hard drive ends up being about 931 GB.

1,000,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 931.3

There was a convention introduced to fix this problem where KB (kilo-byte) would mean 1000 bytes and KiB (Kibi-byte) would mean 1024 bytes. Unfortunately this convention is not gonna be universally adopted anytime soon because it would basically be suicidal for a hard drive company to start selling a 1 TiB drive (which is bigger and hence should be more expensive than a 1 TB drive) and try to convince the average uneducated consumer to buy their more expensive drive over the competitor's.

In programming you generally use binary (base 2), hexadecimal (base 16), and decimal (base 10), depending on the task.

I haven't seen anybody using octal (base 8 ) at all. Maybe what you are referring to is simply that a byte is 8 bits.

A bit is a single 0 or 1. Which you can think of in a primitive machine as literally telling the machine that a certain switch should be flipped on or off.

As oops said, a byte is the smallest unit of memory large enough to store an individual character. They could make bytes 10 bits instead of 8 in order for calculations to be easier for us as humans, but that would be a huge waste of storage space.



Maybe the 8 vs 10 thing you're talking about is about the difference between conventions for prefixes regarding memory size. In most scientific fields Kilo means 1000, Mega 1 million, Giga 1 billion, etc. But with computing KB can mean both 1000 (10^3) bytes and 1024 (2^10) bytes. Windows uses 1024 while the Hard Drive companies use 1000. That's why your 1 TB (10^12 bytes) hard drive ends up being about 931 GB.

1,000,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 931.3

There was a convention introduced to fix this problem where KB (kilo-byte) would mean 1000 bytes and KiB (Kibi-byte) would mean 1024 bytes. Unfortunately this convention is not gonna be universally adopted anytime soon because it would basically be suicidal for a hard drive company to start selling a 1 TiB drive (which is bigger and hence should be more expensive than a 1 TB drive) and try to convince the average uneducated consumer to buy their more expensive drive over the competitor's.