eli5 How do people code with binary?

Question

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

Answer 1

If the computer is programmed correctly, all you *need* is numbers. For example:

72 69 76 76 79 32 57 79 82 76 68 33

Each of the above numbers represents a letter or character on your keyboard, in this instance I just said,

HELLO WORLD!

using numbers (ASCII decimal values, in this case) instead of letters. The computer at its most basic level (again, if we’re talking straight ASCII), however, would read them like this:

010010000100010101001100010011000100111100100000010101110100111101010010010011000100001100100001

All three of these are the exact same pieces of information, just represented in different formats. At their most basic levels, computers understand the last one, and through the Assembly Language we have to teach it to show the same information to us in a way *we* can understand.