Let's make sure we're all on the same page when it comes to understanding how big certain kinds of files are. You'll need to understand this to truly understand what a game-changer BitTorrent is.A byte is eight bits, or eight items that can either be a one or a zero. A character like "a" is 1 byte. Back in the day (before 2017) a Twitter tweet was limited to 140 characters, which would have been 140 bytes. Today, of course, a tweet maxes out at 280 characters or 280 bytes. Depending on context, a kilobyte (KB) is either 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes (or roughly four maxed-out tweets).I took a look at a recent email thread where a colleague and I had emailed back and forth five or six times, and found it took up a little over 6,000 characters. A typical 1,200-word article (again, text only) is about 7,200 characters. We generally measure pure text in kilobytes.A megabyte is about one million bytes or about 1,024KB (about 4,000 maxed-out tweets). You could store 142 typical articles in a single megabyte. We generally measure photos and music in megabytes, because photos and music need to contain a lot more data. A typical iPhone photo is about 3.5MB. An MP3 track is roughly 8MB. And a 10-minute 1080p YouTube video is 158MB (with a lot of compression).Okay, let's get even bigger. Remember that a megabyte is about a thousand kilobytes. A gigabyte is roughly a thousand megabytes. You can store about 125 MP3 tracks in 1GB. We use gigabytes for measuring the size of big files, like movies and operating system distributions.The Ubuntu Linux installer clocks in at 3.6GB. A DVD can hold 4.7GB. The Windows 11 ISO (the downloadable installer) is 5.4GB. The MacOS Monterey installer is 12.16GB. And a Blu-ray movie can range from 25GB to 50GB depending on how the Blu-ray disc is produced.Today, most hard drives are sold in terabyte sizes (although stand-alone SSDs are still available with capacities as little as 64GB and many laptops ship with 256GB SSDs as their default loadout). A terabyte is roughly 1,000GB or… hold on tight now… 1,000,000,000 kilobytes.