Megabyte facts for kids
A megabyte (often shortened to MB) is a common way to measure how much information a computer can store. Think of it like measuring how much water is in a bottle, but for digital stuff!
One megabyte is usually thought of as about 1 million bytes. To give you an idea, a byte is a tiny piece of information, like a single letter or number. A kilobyte is about a thousand bytes, so a megabyte is also about a thousand kilobytes.
We use megabytes to talk about the size of computer files, like photos or songs. We also use it to describe the size of hard drives (where your computer saves files) and computer memory (where your computer temporarily stores information it's using right now).
What is a Megabyte?
For a long time, the word "megabyte" could mean a few slightly different amounts of data. Sometimes it meant exactly 1,000,000 bytes. Other times, especially in computers, it meant 1,048,576 bytes. This number comes from powers of two (220), which computers understand best.
To make things clearer, in 1998, a group called the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) created a new word: mebibyte. A mebibyte always means 1,048,576 bytes. So, now, a megabyte usually means exactly 1,000,000 bytes, and a mebibyte means the slightly larger, computer-friendly number. But don't worry, many people still use "megabyte" for both!
Megabytes and Gigabytes
When you have a thousand megabytes, you get one gigabyte (GB). Gigabytes are used for even larger amounts of data, like the storage space on your phone or the size of a video game.
Images for kids
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A 1.44 MB floppy disk could store a lot of data back in the day!
See also
In Spanish: Megabyte para niños
