Tech Concepts and Terminology
Numbers and units
Everything digital reduces to bits; eight bits make a byte. Storage and file sizes are usually reported in bytes (B), while network throughput is reported in bits per second (bps), so a 100 Mbps link moves at most about 12.5 MB/s. Watch the decimal-versus-binary prefix trap: SI prefixes (KB, MB, GB, TB) step by 1,000, while binary prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB) step by 1,024. Vendors advertise decimal capacity while operating systems often display binary, which is why a '2 TB' drive shows as roughly 1.82 TiB.
Core vocabulary
Candidates should be able to define and contrast: hardware versus software; input, processing, storage, output; CPU cores and clock speed (GHz); RAM (volatile) versus storage (non-volatile); throughput versus latency; bandwidth versus speed. Emerging-technology terms appear as definition questions: cloud computing, virtualization, containers, IoT, AI and machine learning, big data, blockchain, AR/VR, and quantum computing. Know one distinguishing trait for each - for example, blockchain is a distributed ledger, and containers share a host kernel while virtual machines do not.
Worked example
A file is 5,000,000,000 bytes. In decimal that is 5 GB. In binary, divide by 1,024 three times: 5,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 ≈ 4.66 GiB. Rule of thumb: the binary value is about 93% of the decimal value when converting GB to GiB.
Traps
- Mixing b and B in throughput calculations.
- Assuming a higher GHz alone means a faster CPU.
- Treating RAM and storage as interchangeable.