I know this is ultra general, but Ive always wondered how pictures or sound is written to a drive. I understand slightly that data is stored as little bits of sequences of on or off switches, but if you were to write out a drive in english what would that look like for pictures. Does each pixel have a specific code like the #F000F4 or however you see them online? Hope there can be some sort of minor explanation. Thanks.
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It would not be in English. And there is also no agreed upon way to write it out as you could “view” the file contents in multiple ways such as looking at it binary, or hexadecimal etc.
But there really is no “file”. You are right that it is stored as a series of on and off switches. These are stored voltages. There are no actual 1s or 0s being stored inside the computer. 1 and 0 is just an abstraction for high voltage and low voltage.
When you view the file in binary or hexadecimal, you are looking at a monitor which has been fed different voltages via the hdmi or monitor cable from the video card, which got a series of voltages from the cpu or memory, which in turn got the stored voltages from the location (also stored voltage) of said file. The monitor interprets the voltages and turns the pixels different colors.
It’s very interesting to think of the computer in this way. It’s voltages all the way down.
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