I was always fascinated by how computers work and i know that its basically just a bunch of 1 and 0s called binary code hut how do you even get a computer to even understand that in the first place
In: 0
We use numbers, we have 10 of them, and it’s because we have 10 fingers so that seemed like the right number.
For a computer, there’s a wire either has a voltage on it or not. Thus, 1 or a 0. This went along with the way data was stored- a pit on a magnetic media like a floppy disc could be either magnetized north or south (2 states). A punch card either has a punch or not (2 states). So having only two possible digits made sense.
The computer understands it because binary is as native for the computer as decimal (0-9) is for us. It’s like if you take French lessons and find it hard to understand, and then you go to France and you see people talking fluently, and ask them how do they understand it so fast. They understand it because it’s native for them.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way, binary is how *we* understand how *computers* work. A computer has no concept of a 1 or 0, all it “knows” is high and low voltage going into its transistors. Each transistor takes a voltage in and opens or closes a switch for another wire depending on that voltage. You then stack ~~trillions~~billions of these transistors in such a way that humans can control the input voltages (typing a key, clicking a mouse, etc) and the layers and layers of transistors feed the correct voltage at the end that we’re looking for. Those final voltages control things like the monitor and speakers.
The computer doesn’t know what it’s doing, all it knows is how to feed voltages through it’s circuits, which we humans represent as 1 (high voltage) or 0 (low voltage)
Edit: apparently it’s billions of them, not trillions
It’s not so much that they “understand” 1 or 0. It’s much more basic than that. In a computer 0 or 1 is often low voltage or high voltage. Computers are just a dumb piece of silicon that we’ve made do calculations by creating complexity from a handful of logic gates.
Everything computers do or “understand” is because they’ve been built/programmed that way.
Computers are basically built from the ground up to understand binary.
It’s helpful if you think of binary, not as 1’s and 0’s, but ON or OFF. When you’re designing a computer, you’ll have different wires and lines connecting different pieces and depending on whether or not the wire has electricity running down it will affect what the computer is doing. So the hardware is built to say “if the electricity is on for this line, then I’ll do this, but if it’s off, then I’ll do this other thing or do nothing”. When you have a program written in binary, it will be turning these signals on or off depending on what it needs to do.
Computers understand 0s and 1s like abacuses understand whether a bead is up or down.
That is, they don’t.
We humans can move beads on an abacus up or down, and we can flip switches on or off in a computer, but that doesn’t mean the computer or abacus understands what is happening.
The “meaning” that we get from abacuses is interpreting the end results of having moved a lot of beads according to our own rules. And the “meaning” that we get from computers is interpreting the end results of having flipped a lot of switches according to our own rules as well.
Computers don’t understand anything. They are simply machines which process vast sets of ones and zeroes based on our instructions.
The BIOS. It defines bit strings for e.g. letters and numbers. When you type an A the keyboard sends 01100001. The computer understands it as an A because we build it to interpret that as an A. That’s it.
A byte is 8 bits. We decided a byte is 8 bits because that’s how many bits it takes to uniquely represent all the English letters, numbers, and symbols. With 8 bits you can represent 256 unique things. With 7, only 128 things. There are more than 128 English characters, and less than 256. So 8 bits it is.
The ASCII table defines what bit strings are assigned to what symbols. We just assigned them. No magic. A is 01100001.
This allows us to enter information into a computer, and it allows the computer to give information back to us. It allows us to tell the computer what to do. The first programs were very simple and super hard to write. Based on those tools we built more complex things more easily. Now we can build really complex things very easily. In the future the computers will build the complex things themselves.
Think of a merry-go-round. The horses bob up and down as it goes around and around. Imagine if there were turtles under the merry-go-round and the horses were jumping over them. You can’t see where the turtles are under the floor but your horsey goes jumps when it does find one. When the horse jumps up you yell “wee” every time it does. Your parents off to the side are recording your “weee”‘s while your high and your “awe”‘s while on the ground. Your 2 brothers, tin and frank, have a bet with your parents. Tim thinks you’ll say weee, weee, awe, wee. Frank thinks you’ll go awe, awe, wee, wee. Your parents are recording your ups and downs and tim is the winner. This causes their friends to make bets but they all want a different combination. How many combinations of 4 yells can we get? Your first yell had 2 choices, and the second yell had 2 choices, so 2*2 is 4. Another yell had 2 choices, so 8 combinations so far. Lastly your 4th yell brings us up to 16 different choices between your brothers and friends. Your parents can’t keep up with all their names so they just call them kid 0, kid 1… and lastly kid 15. You get done with a set of 4 yells and this time kid 7 won the bet. He goes down and tells his mom and dad that he got picked. There is someone recording all of this and he sees kid 7 won the bet, then kid 0, then kid 15, and then kid 2, or what he writes down 70f2. He wrote f instead of 15 because he was using graph paper and using letters (a-f) for (10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) was just easier. This 70f2 represented 32 of your yells. That is a 32 bit integer. The festival people have bets going on their own and 70f2 has a special meaning to them. That means Suzy needs to go trade places with marge at the front desk, Marge is needed at the main office.
All your “weee”‘s and “awe”‘s are simply strong or weak magnets on a really small magnet like the one on your fridge. They use another magnet to measure if that spot is pushing the horsey magnet up or pulling it down. They’ve even figured out how to measure not just pushing or pulling, but nearly pulling and nearly pushing, thus bundling 2 of your yells I to one recording. These bits get read off and bundled together into 32 bits and sent to some registers, like that guy in the office was doing writing down 70f2. Some of these are used in the CPU and each bit gets routed to different digital machines that control how the CPU works. You might have one machine that adds 2 numbers together, and another machine that is subtracting them. Both of their outputs can be used, but one of the bits from the 32 bits is telling it pick the addition and throw away the subtraction. All the instructions are simply routing specific bits to different machines so that the right path gets picked and the CPU does the instruction right.
If you would like to learn to build a computer from scratch in an easy to digest and understandable way, play the game Turing Complete. It starts with very simple concepts, but you build a legitimate working computer by the end that you can program yourself. I promise you will have a very solid understanding of how binary and computers work if you can reach the turing complete stage. If you like puzzles, it’s a ton of fun as well.
1 and 0 is just how us humans represent what a computer sees. It comes from “On” and “Off” and evolved from the representation for closed and open circuits, | and O, or the same things you see one a lot of power switches. Early computers used a series of powered and non-powered circuits to perform their operations (they still do, only at a *much* smaller level and its through voltage differences instead of power/no power). Since most typewriters and printers of the age didn’t have the | symbol on them, printed media used 1 and 0. It’s just sort of stuck that way.
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