eli5: how do computers tell the difference between letters and numbers

Question

eli5: how do computers tell the difference between letters and numbers

In: Technology

Answer 1

All the data that a computer interacts with is represented as electric charge. The presence or lack of this charge (“on” and “off”) can be conceptualised as binary numbers (0 or 1). So conceptually all the data a computer deals with are numbers.

Whether that binary data should be interpreted as literal numbers, or characters, or image data, or executable instructions, or whatever, ultimately is determined by the programmer writing the software, using various standards for storing data (file systems, file extensions etc).