Методическое пособие по совершенствованию навыков чтения и говорения на английском языке для студентов фксиС и фитиУ
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английский для ИТ 1
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- Quantifying Bits and Bytes Even though the word “bit”
| Character data is composed of letters, symbols, and numerals that are not used in arithmetic operations. A digital computer uses a series of bits to represent letters, characters, and numerals. Computers employ several types of codes to represent character data, including ASCII, EBCDIC, and Unicode. ASCII (pronounced “ASK ee”, American Standard Code for Information Interchange,) requires only seven bits for each character. ASCII requires codes for 128 characters.
A superset of ASCII, called Extended ASCII, uses eight bits to represent each character. Using eight bits instead of seven bits allows Extended ASCII to provide codes for 256 characters. Unicode (pronounced ‘YOU ni code’) uses sixteen bits and provides codes for 65,000 characters. To work with music and pictures, they must be digitized. The term to digitize means to convert raw, analog data into digital format represented by 0s and 1s. A photograph or drawing can be digitized by treating it as a series of colored dots. Each dot is assigned a binary number according to its color. A digital image is simply a list of color numbers for all the dots it contains. In a similar way, music can be digitized by assigning binary codes to notes. All the “stuff” that your computer works with is stored in files as a long series of 1s and 0s. Your computer needs to know whether to interpret those 1s and 0s as ASCII code, binary numbers, or the code for a picture or sound. To avoid confusion, most computer files contain a file header with information about the code used to represent the file data. A file header can be read by the computer, but never appears on the screen. By reading the header information, a computer can tell how a file’s contents were coded. Quantifying Bits and Bytes Even though the word “bit” is an abbreviation for “binary digit”, it can be further abbreviated, usually as a lowercase “b”. A byte is composed of eight bits and usually abbreviated as an uppercase “B”. Transmission speeds are typically expressed in bits, whereas storage space is typically expressed in bytes. When working with computers, you’ll frequently encounter references such as “50 kilobits per second”. In common usage, “kilo”, abbreviated as “K”, means a thousand. In the decimal number system we use on a daily basis, the number 1,000 is 10 to the 3rd power, or 10³. In the world of computers where base 2 is the norm, a “kilo” is precisely 1,024, or 2¹º. A kilobit (Kb or Kbit) is 1,024 bits, a megabit is 1,048,576 or 2²º bits, a gigabit is 1,073,741,824 bits or 2³º bits. Digital Electronics Because most computers are electronic devices, bits take the form of electrical pulses that can travel over circuits, in much the same way that electricity flows over a wire when you turn on a light switch. All the circuits, chips, and mechanical components that form a computer are designed to work with bits. Most of these essential components are housed within the computer’s system unit. A computer’s system unit typically contains circuit boards, storage devices, and a power supply that converts current from an AC wall outlet into the DC current used by computer circuitry. The terms “computer chip”, “microchip” and “chip” originated as technical jargon for “integrated circuit”. An integrated circuit (IC) is a super-thin slice of semiconducting material packed with microscopic circuit elements, such as wires, transistors, capacitors, logic gates, and resistors. Semiconducting materials are substances with properties between those of a conductor and an insulator. The assortment of chips inside a computer includes the microprocessor, memory modules, and support circuitry. The computer’s main board, called a system board, “motherboard”, or ”main board”, houses all essential chips and provides connecting circuitry between them. жүктеу/скачать 0,77 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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