How Computers Work: Binary & Data
You’ve probably heard that computers work in binary. You may have also seen frightening images like these. However, nearly no one nowadays works directly with these ones and zeros. However, ones and zeros play a significant part in how computers operate on the inside. Electric cables and circuits carry all of the information in a computer’s inside.
How do you use electricity to store or represent data? The signal could be on or off if you have a single wire with energy flowing through it. There aren’t many options here, but it’s a good start. We can express a yes or no, true or false, one or zero, or anything else with only two alternatives with just one wire. A bit is the smallest piece of information a computer can store, and it represents the on/off state of a single wire.
More wires equals more bits, or more ones and zeros. You may represent more complex information with more bits. However, in order to comprehend this, we must first learn about the binary number system.
We have 10 digits from zero to nine in the decimal number system, and that’s how we’ve all learned to count. Only have two digits in the binary number system: 0 and 1.
Each location in binary has a value as well. Instead of multiplying by 10, we divide by two each time. There is a 1 position, a 2 position, a 4 position, an 8 position, and so forth. In binary, for example, the number 9 is 1001. To compute the value, multiply 1 by 8, plus 0 by 4, plus 0 by 2, plus 1 by 1.
Read More: What Makes a Computer, a Computer?
Because computers do the arithmetic for us, almost no one does it. What matters that any number can represented using simply ones and zeros, or by a series of on/off wires. The larger the numbers you can hold, the more wires you utilize.
You can store numbers between 0 and 255 on 8 wires. That’s a total of eight.
You can store anything from 0 to over 4 billion with just 32 wires. You can represent any number using the binary number system. But what about different forms of data? Do you prefer text, graphics, or sound? All of these things, it turns out, can expressed numerically. Consider the alphabet’s entire alphabet. Each letter could given a number. A might be the number one, B could be the number two, and so on. Any word or paragraph can therefore represented as a series of numbers. These numbers can stored as on or off electrical impulses, as we’ve seen.
A system like this represents every word you see on a webpage or on your phone. Let’s take a look at images, videos, and any other graphics you might encounter on a screen. All of these images made up of tiny dots known as pixels, each of which has a distinct hue. Numbers can used to symbolize each of the colors. When you consider that the average image has millions of pixels and that a normal movie displays 30 images every second, we’re talking about a lot of data.
Every sound made up of a sequence of air vibrations. A waveform can used to graphically illustrate vibrations. A number can used to represent any point on this waveform. Any sound may broken down into a series of numbers this way. You can choose between 32-bit audio and 8-bit audio if you desire better sound quality.
More bits equals a larger numerical range. When you write code or create your own software on a computer, you’re not interacting with these ones and zeros directly.
You will, however, be dealing with images, sound, or video. So, if you want to know how computers function on the inside, it all boils down to these simple ones and zeros and the electrical signals that flow through the circuits beneath them. They form the foundation of how all computers receive, store, process, and output data.
What Makes a Computer, Well, a Computer?
