the.com/gigabyte
a billion bytes, give or take a marketing department's definition.
means A unit of digital information equal to roughly a billion bytes (1,000,000,000 by the decimal standard, or 1,073,741,824 in the binary one), used to measure storage and memory.
from A modern compound built from two pieces. 'Giga-' is a metric prefix meaning a billion, adopted into the international system of units from the Greek 'gigas,' meaning 'giant' — the same root that gives us 'gigantic.' 'Byte' was coined in the 1950s by computer engineers at IBM as a deliberate respelling of 'bite' (a small chunk of data), the spelling tweaked to avoid confusion with 'bit.' Stitched together, 'gigabyte' literally promises a giant bite — though, as the essence notes, the size of that bite depends on who's counting.
- size war
- Drive makers count 1000MB, computers count 1024
- text capacity
- Holds roughly 1000 books worth of plain text
- prefix root
- Giga comes from Greek for giant
- shrinking value
- Once cost millions, now fractions of a cent
gigabyte motherboards — computer hardware company since 1986, produces intel and amd motherboards