Like how do they turn the electricity running through them into actual 1’s and 0’s and show all of that on my screen?
In: 0
Just like you might tell someone “blink once for yes, twice for no”, it’s a predetermined code that both the sender and the receiver know how to interpret. Instead of blinks it’s whether a voltage is present or not present in a circuit (as in the circuit is on or off.)
One predetermined code that a sender and receiver might use to communicate is ASCII, which uses eight ons/offs in a row to represent a symbol in the English alphabet. So “off, on, off, off, off, off, off, on” means the capital letter “A”. For brevity, let’s use 0 to mean “off” and 1 to mean “on”, and call each 0 or 1 a “bit” of information. “A” is 01000001, and “B” is 01000010, and there’s a pattern for each symbol you want to send.
Another predetermined code might represent pixels in an image, and would be something like “the first eight bits are how red the pixel is, the next eight are how blue it is, and the third eight are how green it is.” Yet another code could represent a sound wave and might be “the next sixteen bits are the amplitude (power) of this wave at this one very tiny slice of time. “The sixteen bits after are the next super tiny slice of time”, and so on.
Literally any information can be _encoded_ into patterns of bits, and _decoded_ by the receiver of the communication, given that the sender and receiver both know which set of rules are being applied to the bits being transferred.
Latest Answers