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One binary data (that can be a 1 or a 0) is called a bit. For example a data 1001 is a 4 bit data. Where first bit is 1, second bit is 0, third bit is another 0 and
fourth bit is 1.
Bit is computer terminology for chunk.
How instructions can be represented by bits?
One bit data can only represent 1 out of 2 possible states either 1 or 0. Which in real world can be used to represent things such as on or off, high or low, black or white any 2 states condition?
If we increase instruction size to 2 bits, then we can represent 4 instructions 00, or 01, or 10 or 11. If we increase size to 3 bits then we can represent 8 possible instructions 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111
If you notice trend from above examples is that maximum possible number of instructions is power of 2 of bit size. That is 2 bits can represent maximum of 2^2 (which is 4) instructions, and 3 bits can represent maximum of 2^3 (which is 2x2x2 = 8) instructions.
So 8 bits data can represent maximum of 2^8 (2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 256) instructions (or states) and 32 bits data can represent 2^32 (4,294,967,296) instructions.
You can actually read a program stream contents using certain editor normally called HEX editor. Using these special text editors you can look at instructions in binary, hexadecimal, octal, and decimal format.
Ill cover details of what each of above format (hex, oct and dec) means in other article.
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