Think about the light switches in your house. A light switch has two states – it’s either ON or it’s OFF. In the world of computers, an ON switch represents a “1” and an OFF switch represents a “0”. This is the fundamental concept of binary code: the system of 1s (ONs) and 0s (OFFs) that computers use to represent all information.
But how can you represent complex information using just 1s and 0s? Let’s use an example.
Consider a simple text message “Hi”. In a computer, this message is converted into binary code using an agreed-upon system called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). According to ASCII, the letter “H” is represented as 01001000 and “i” as 01101001.
So, in the memory of your computer, “Hi” would be stored as:
01001000 01101001
This looks more complex, but it’s just a series of ONs and OFFs – light switches in your computer being flipped in a particular sequence.
Now, when you want to send this message, your computer will read this binary code, know it needs to send the characters “H” and “i”, and then translate that into the appropriate signals to show “Hi” on the screen or send it over the internet.
All kinds of data – whether it’s text, images, audio, or video – are ultimately broken down into these strings of 1s and 0s in a computer. For instance, colors in an image or notes in a song have their unique binary representations.
This system allows computers to process and handle all kinds of data accurately and quickly, using electrical signals that can be either ON or OFF. However, it’s the software on the computer that interprets these 1s and 0s and translates them into something we humans can understand – like the text message “Hi”.
It’s an incredibly complex dance of billions of tiny switches, but at the heart of it, that’s how a computer uses 1s and 0s.
