Ok, so I know that the alphabet of computers consists of only two symbols, or states: zero and one.
I also seem to understand how computers count beyond one even though they don’t have symbols for anything above one.
What I do NOT understand is how a computer knows* that a particular string of ones and zeros refers to a number, or a letter, or a pixel, or an RGB color, and all the other types of data that computers are able to render.
*EDIT: A lot of you guys hang up on the word “know”, emphasing that a computer does not know anything. Of course, I do not attribute any real awareness or understanding to a computer. I’m using the verb “know” only figuratively, folks ;).
I think that somewhere under the hood there must be a physical element–like a table, a maze, a system of levers, a punchcard, etc.–that breaks up the single, continuous stream of ones and zeros into rivulets and routes them into–for lack of a better word–different tunnels? One for letters, another for numbers, yet another for pixels, and so on?
I can’t make do with just the information that computers speak in ones and zeros because it’s like dumbing down the process human communication to the mere fact of relying on an alphabet.
In: 264
Well it’s not really 0 and 1, we use this as a way of notation so humans can make sense of it, what actually happens is that your computer components communicate using signals of electricity, 1 is a strong pulse of electricity and 0 is a ~~lack of it~~ weak pulse.
Your computer receives a series of electric pulses from your keyboard or mouse and does a lot of computations inside by moving that power through the CPU, GPU, memory etc. Each component will do different alteration to them and in the end will send them back to your screen as a series of electric pulses.
Each component will interact with the electric pulses differently: your screen will change color of pixel, your memory will write them to memory or transmit them to another component, your CPU and GPU will perform instructions based on them and deliver the result back as electrical impulses etc.
How your computer identifies a series of 1’s and 0’s as a certain number or letter is that there is a sort of dictionary (or better put series of instructions) that translate what different components should do with certain pulses they receive. Looking right down to the very basic part of your computer, it’s a very big series of circuits that based on the electric pulses they receive, do different computations using different circuits and the results generated by these get translated by your interface devices into useful information for humans.
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