Eli5: How does electricity = data?

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We have electronics that can do a multitude of incredible things. I understand that data has to do with the binary system, but I can’t get my head around how electricity can be transfered into data… and how that data can then generate images and render graphics, etc. I mean, wut!? Plz hlp, brain cannot compute.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Electricity doesn’t “transfer into data” any more than ink on paper “transfers into” words. The electricity is just the physical medium we use to store or transmit that data. Humans are the ones that give it meaning.

Binary also isn’t that extraordinary. It’s just another way to represent numbers. We happen to use 10 digits because we have 10 fingers. Computers use a 2-digit number system because it neatly maps to two discrete states of electricity (on or off) and we can easily build components to work with that.

So electricity is the physical medium, binary data is the abstract representation. The only step from there is to represent concepts like text or images or even math or logic operations using binary numbers, and thus electricity. And for that, we have different standards, protocols, instruction sets, file formats etc for different use cases. A simple example is ASCII, a standard which lets use groups of 8 binary digits to represent a variety of English letters, numbers and other symbols.

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