From the course: Digital Media Foundations

Binary, the language of computers

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Binary, the language of computers

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- Computers use numbers for just about everything. Even when it doesn't seem to be a number, it is. Take letters, for example. When you type a letter on a computer, it actually has a numerical value and it's the number the computer records and reproduces. But there's an even more fundamental piece of information computers use and understanding it will help you understand a great amount of technologies. It's binary. In it's simplest form, binary just means something that has two states. This could be off and on, up and down, light and dark. Anything that has two recognizable conditions. Computers storage drives generally use magnetism, if there's a magnetic charge or not. Though, it's not all that important for our purposes how the binary's recorded. What matters is that the numbers we get from these systems will either be zero or one. And it's always zero or one. There are some clever quantum computing systems that do things differently and they've experimented with recording a zero, a one, and a two. But for our purposes, and for the purposes of pretty much every computer ever made, we'll stick to zero and one. Of course, zero and one on their own don't do much for us. But computers have a clever system for turning different combinations of ones and zeroes into much more complex numbers. And it's these complex numbers that we use to do just about everything computer technology can do today. Before we get to that, let's start by finding out why computers like binary so much in the first place.

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