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

It’s predefined. There is a fascinating (or not) history to and technical justification for how technology developers settled on an “8 bit byte” which then also became a 16, 32, 64, 128, or bigger bit byte, but in every case the answer is the same: it’s predefined how many digits the reader will consider.