I searched for similar questions here and none of them really gave the answer I’m looking for.
I understand we have the concept of encoding where in the ascii scheme, the letter A, for example, is encoded to 01000001, because humans agreed on this to be so, *but where actually is that A* when the binary calls for it, if physically in the cpu, for this example we just have 8 microscopic transistors, 2 holding a charge and 6 without a charge that we point to and say “That there means A…but it also means 65 in decimal”? Clearly there’s some level of abstraction here I’m not aware of.
Does 01000001 actually just correspond to a standardized pixel arrangement in the shape of A that is only actually rendered by the hardware in the situation where it’s called to be printed on a screen?
In: 0
It’s not in the CPU. It’s easiest to talk about the early DOS era. In that time, it’s in RAM, copied initially from a table burned into the BIOS, which is the software that boots the machine and provides some basic capabilities.
There you find a font, 256 cells of 8×8 or 8×16 depending on video mode, in which each character is drawn in binary. As in 1=white, 0=black.
So in position 65 you’ll find a picture of an “A”.
And if you have the [right software](https://int10h.org/blog/img/fontraption-1.png) you can modify that memory, and you’ll see every “A” on the screen change the moment you touch it.
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