If digital data is stored in 0s & 1s, how does the reader know how many of the digits to take into consideration?

Question

Must be a very basic and dumb question. But ‘1001’ can be 9 and also 2 & 1 if ’10’ & ’01’ is taken seperately. I’m confused.

In: 49

Answer 1

I’ll just add — during the floppy disk era, you couldn’t even easily transfer a text document between systems. Every system had their own encoding schemes, not to mention their own disk formatting schemes. It was annoying.