17/02/2026
As someone who works in IT, do you know what actually is meant by a bit? And that 8 of them make up a byte?
It turns out that a bit is either an off or an on signal using voltages. Picture an electric multi meter. When the multi meter reads 0v, that represents an off or zero. When the multi meter reads 5v (In a 5v system), that represents an on signal or a one. These voltage readings are sent in series (typically in 8s or bytes) along a single wire from a sender to a receiver in very high speeds (or frequencies) in mega hertz and increasingly, giga hertz. A Mega Hertz is one million cycles in a second and a Giga Hertz is a billion. Back in the earlier days of electrical communication, technologies such as morse code used the same concept having human operators send pulses of electricity representing symbols in language (English, German, etc...).
These same pulses of electricity make up our modern communication methods (protocols) such TCP/IP suite, I2C, Serial, UART, CAN to name a few.
Say you capture an unencrypted http frame, you can check with the http specification and decode the frame into plain text and extract all its information like the sender MAC, IP, Port, receiver MAC, IP, Port and even the payload.
Our modern communications still rely on bits. Now you have a high level view of what a bit is (Hopefully) and how that ties into modern communication protocols.
PNGCS Admin
