If you lift the lid of a computer, you will see a circuit board into which a number of little boxes have been plugged. Each box contains a chip, which consists of thousands of microscopic electric circuits, each of which can be either on or off. This is the only language that the computer understands. It is one of my circuits on or off. A sequence of several ons and offs in various combinations can represent any number, or letter, or graphic symbol, and we can symbolize these ons and offs by using a 1 to stand for on and a 0 to stand for off. Most computers can represent any of the symbols on their keyboards by various combinations for a total of exactly 8 ons and 0s. Since this language or code is based on two digits, 1 or 0, just as a bicycle is based on two wheels, or a biplane is based on two pairs of wings, it is called the binary code, from the Latin word binaries, meaning two together, and each of the ones and zeros is called a binary digit, or bit for short. So it takes 8 bits to represent any keyboard character, such a group of 8 bits is called a byte. One byte is the equivalent of one character. This computer can store or remember roughly 32,000 bytes. That means you can feed a programming to it that uses up to 32,000 characters, letters, numbers, or graphic symbols. Just as a kilometer is a thousand meters, and a kilogram is a thousand grams, so is a kilobite roughly a thousand bytes. This computer therefore has a 32 kilobite memory, or a 32k memory for short. But the memory of most small personal computers can be extended to at least double that, 64k. This may sound a lot, but it isn't. The average page of a book contains about 2,000 characters. It's a 2k page, so even a 64k computer can only store as many characters as a 32-page book. And a 32k computer only as many as a 16-page book. Although of course, a computer can do a lot more with its characters than a book can, but that's another story.