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
The computer on it’s own doesn’t know what any of it means. *we* know what it means, and we know where we stored the data, so we can write a program that reads and interprets it in the correct way. A lot of that can be automated, because you can tell what type of file something is from the header. But again, that’s *our* way of interpreting the header, which is just a binary string, to mean different file types and such.
The computer is, at a basic level, just following the instructions that we give it to manipulate the data, and use that to display things on the screen for instance.
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