Forum Topic : How Big is a Program? | |
Submitted by Curie on 23/06/2009 - 06:50 PM | |
Computer programs can be as small as a few hundred bytes or as large as a few billion bytes. When a program is loaded into RAM from disk, the pattern of the bits is copied exactly, even one bit wrong can cause the program to fail. Computer hardware has been engineered so this doesn't happen. If an application is 40 Megabytes in size, then roughly 320 Million bits are copied into RAM. The prefix Kilo, Mega and Giga indicate the size of a program or data file in bytes. A Kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes and a Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. Put another way, a Gigabyte is 8,589,934,592 individual on/off switches! |
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