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

Not dumb, a great question.

On the microprocessor level the hardware is designed to always read a certain number of digits, called “bits” in this case, and 4 bits become a “nibble”, 8 bits are a “byte”.

So a 16 bit microprocessor would read the value “one” as

0000 0000 0000 0001

and read “ten” as

0000 0000 0000 1010

So in older days, the processor size was a big deal, I played a lot of video games so I remember that the Nintendo was 8-bit, we then 16-bit systems (Sega and Super Nintendo). and then 32/64 bit processors with Nintendo 64, etc.

For the most part we’ve stuck at 64 bit for our processors for many reasons.