Like I get that it can be a 1 or a 0, and that stores information, but how do you get information out of that? And how do people code with it? Seems like all it could store is numbers
Edit: Thank you all, this is very helpful
In: Technology
Every 1 or 0 represents part of a circuit being opened or closed.
So maybe, a light switch being turned on could be 1, off could be 0. If you have eight lights, you could use each combination to represent a different character, and you have 256 combinations. You can start making fairly complex messages from that. The most widespread standardized use of eight characters is called ASCII, and it includes combinations for letters, numbers, and other characters. Of course, limiting it to eight bits, there is a maximum of 256 possible characters which can be encoded in ASCII, and you may have to rely on something more complicated for anything beyond the basic Latin alphabet, Arabic numerals, and common non-alphanuneric characters. So, there are other standards that are more complicated, like Unicode. ASCII is my example because it’s widespread, not particularly complex, but complex enough to give you an idea of how things work.
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