What exactly is a byte?

“Who cares, not me! I just want to send my tremendously fat file!”

“Ok, then click on the link to Sprend to send quickly and smoothly! sprend.com Leave those of us who want to know more about bytes alone! Sooo, where were we now?”

Well, "byte" is a measurement unit for information size and is often abbreviated B. That's why you sometimes see kB, MB and GB listed. Of course, there have been many chefs in the broth since the rise of computers, so this text is a gross simplification, and we like that!

Ones and zeros!

To complicate matters straight away, a byte nowadays usually consists of eight bits (b), a so-called octet, i.e. a sequence of eight information-carrying bits that have the value 1 or 0.

Delightful music!

Lucia choir, bit late now don’t you think? A satisfied user just told us how happy grandma and grandpa were when they finally got to see a 117.7 MB film clip of their grandson's Lucia choir, taken with their cell phone camera in December. The user had not managed to email the film, because it was too large. After a tip, a free account was registered with Sprend and in no time the film was sent. Late, but much appreciated!

“Oh yes, you say, that thing with ones and zeroes sounds familiar.”

The context and the combination of these sequences, with ones or zeros, determines how the information should be interpreted.

A lot of work goes into bridging different ways of working. Many email servers for example, use 7-bit character sequences. Others use 16 bits, etc. In addition, byte is often used as the basic unit when talking about memories, for example hard drives. Many other designations are used, for transmission speed and so on, but we won't go into that here.

Worth mentioning however, is that there is an industry standard called Unicode, a bit like a lexicon of all ones and zeros. Its purpose is to have a common character encoding that works for everyone, regardless of language or computer system in the world, so that we can understand each other. The standard covers more than 100,000 characters, and uses a number of methods to store the characters in computers. Is it uppercase or lowercase? Is it a Chinese character? Is it an emoji? How should the characters be displayed, is it right-to-left writing like in Arabic? Unicode helps with all of these things.

Well then, how much is a megabyte?

1 GB = 1024 MB
1024 MB = 1 048 576 KB
1 048 576 KB = 1 073 741 824 Bytes
1 073 741 824 Bytes = 8 589 934 592 Bits

Sprend makes it easy to send large files, we say. “Well, why do we say that?”

“Well, because it's not so easy to send large files and folders via your email inbox, right? An attached link in an email, on the other hand, is a super flexible way. The recipient just clicks on the link to be able to download the file that you already uploaded to Sprend.”

Loads of people have been using Sprend's free version since 2004. 2 GB/or a maximum of 10 files per month can be sent with Sprend Free. How much is that really? Well, quite a lot actually:

1. How about a book such as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? Times 17,500 copies!

(Calculation: The book has about 50,000 words. An average word in a novel is four letters. Including the space character, that's 250,000 characters in a book. We downloaded a free book and zipped it, making it 60% smaller. So with that logic, the Hitchhiker's Guide would take up 100KB as a file, with just text in it. Adding 20% for formatting with paragraphs and pages and fonts and we get 120KB. We can thus fit 17,500 Hitchhiker's Guide-sized books into a single Sprend package.)

2. Nice bits : )

regular picture taken with my mobile camera recently contained 4.3 MB.

3. Sizes depend on quality, but if you compare it to how you use a cell phone, when you buy data credit: 2GB is enough to stream 12 hours of music or watch two hours of Netflix. 2 GB is 2 billion bytes.

With Sprend Pro, you can send up to 100GB at a time as many times as you want and to many people at the same time. -Who sends such huge files? Well, for example, an organization that wants to send a backup. Anyway, it's a nice feeling to know that everything works when you want to send, and a little margin is never wrong.

We sometimes have users who get in touch and want to sprend bigger files, no problem, we'll help you.

• The largest file sent last year was 355 GB (a zip file downloaded four times), and the smallest was 1 byte (probably a file from MS-DOS, Microsoft's first operating system.)

Send a whole library with sprend.com!