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 used to be the case that these codes would point to an address in a ROM chip that would contain the actual character graphics, so you might have
ROM Address 01000001000 = 01111000
ROM Address 01000001001 = 11001100
ROM Address 01000001010 = 11001100
ROM Address 01000001011 = 11111100
ROM Address 01000001100 = 11001100
ROM Address 01000001101 = 11001100
ROM Address 01000001110 = 11001100
ROM Address 01000001111 = 00000000
So the video chip will read the character, look up the graphic for that character, and display it.
In modern computers it’s way more complex, but the idea is the same.
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