Eli5: how do computers actually delete information entirely?

Question

How does it physically “forget” whatever coded form it held my word document in for example?

In: Technology

Answer 1

So, digital storage is not like a book where you write and erase what you wrote, but more like little switches that turn on or off, with the information being in how a group of switches looks like. For instance, let’s say I group every eight switches, and an A is writen as 0100 0001 (with 0 being “off” and 1 being “on”). So, how do you delete it? Well, you can’t, you have to move some switches to write over it, maybe all zeroes, maybe some gibberish.