Bytes

A byte is the elementary unit of storage in Commodore computers and many others. For practical purposes, a byte can be thought of as equivalent to one printed character. The word Commodore then, with nine letters, would take nine bytes of storage space on a disk or in main memory.

A kilobyte, or K, is 2^10 bytes, or 1024 bytes. It gets its name from the Greek prefix meaning one thousand, though strictly speaking it's a little larger than that.  A megabyte, often used in measuring the storage capacity of hard disks, is nominally a thousand K. More accurately it's 1024K, or 1,048,576 bytes.

There are about 2000 characters on a double-spaced typewritten sheet of pap- er, so all the text on such a page could be stored in about 2K of memory or disk space. One disk in a 1541 drive holds about 175K bytes, or the equivalent of a bout 90 double-spaced typewritten pages. Because the 1571 drive is double-sided , its disks can hold 350K bytes of information, or about the same as that in 175 typewritten pages.

The smaller hard disk drives commonly used in IBM PC's and clones will hold 20 megabytes of information, or five times the number of characters as in the King James version of the Bible.

Let's see that means the Headgap will now hold 25 Bibles worth of programs.