There is information available on Tecommunication Standards and Manufacturers , and Home Pages for Telephone Companies and Television and Cable Companies . In this section, the goal is to define and explain several terms that you will need to understand in order to work with the professionals. The term BIT is an abbreviation of Binary DigIT, and is a value of 0 or 1 in binary arithmetic, on or off within the circuits or magnetic states of computing equipment. A bit does not represent data or information, but is part of a code that does represent units of data. The smallest unit of data that has meaning is a BYTE, which consists of a number of bits organized to represent data.
Most hardware uses either seven or eight bits as a single byte.
Each byte uses a series of 0 and 1 bit values to represent a letter, number or symbol. Various peripheral devices are used to convert the binary data used by computers to letters, numbers or symbols that can be understood by people. Communications Lines Communications lines can be classified according to their speed, mode and type. There are two types of line modes, Analog and Digital. Analog lines carry a smooth, wavy signal that modulated from one frequency to another.