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12-11-2010, 07:01 PM
Binary
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Binary is the computers language. If it is electronic, it uses binary. Binary is a base-2 system of numbers, and it only uses 0's and 1's as its "words". 0's mean "Off" and 1's mean "On". This is how the computer knows what to do. If you ever seen videos of computers back in the day, they used have very specialized operators that would flip thousands of switches on and off manually. They were directly telling the computer what do via binary. Understand now?
The smallest unit of data on a computer is the bit. A bit is either one 0 or one 1. When you have eight bits, you have a byte. So a series of eight 0's and 1's is a byte. The example below is a byte of data.
This is where it begins to trick people. You have to take this, pointblank. There is no other way to understand this than to just accept it into your mind.
Binary is read like a sentence, left to right:
00100100
-------->
But is wrote from right to left
00100100
<--------
Now understanding that binary is a Base 2 system, we understand everything goes up in exponents of two, E.G 1,2,4,8,16,32 and so on...
we have this:
Read this way:
----------------------->
--0--0--1-0-0-1-0-0
128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
<-----------------------
Wrote this way ^
So 1's are on and 0's are off, right? We are going to count what is on. So since the 1's above are 4 and the 32 (see how it goes up by a power of two each bit?), we add those up too a total of 36.
ASCII (pronounced ASK-E) is an eight bit system. This is how we translate binary to the symbols, letters and numbers we type, amongst other things. We can compare to a chart of standard ASCII characters.
Binary is cumulative. So we have two bytes:
00000001 00000001
The last number on the first byte is 128. Since it doubles, the first number on the second byte is 256. So we have the above. It is equal to 257. This does not translate to anything on the standard ASCII or extended ASCII code chart, so this means this is other a more complex set of instructions (say a pixel?) or these are two individual characters meaning both are equal to 1, or null.
From here, it gets much more complex, but this is for the basics. So I am going to leave this at that. You hopefully have what came for. If you have suggestions for improvement or need extra advice, PM me, add me on MSN, AIM or YIM, or drop me an email at:
[email protected]
Hope this helped you.
The smallest unit of data on a computer is the bit. A bit is either one 0 or one 1. When you have eight bits, you have a byte. So a series of eight 0's and 1's is a byte. The example below is a byte of data.
This is where it begins to trick people. You have to take this, pointblank. There is no other way to understand this than to just accept it into your mind.
Binary is read like a sentence, left to right:
00100100
-------->
But is wrote from right to left
00100100
<--------
Now understanding that binary is a Base 2 system, we understand everything goes up in exponents of two, E.G 1,2,4,8,16,32 and so on...
we have this:
Read this way:
----------------------->
--0--0--1-0-0-1-0-0
128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
<-----------------------
Wrote this way ^
So 1's are on and 0's are off, right? We are going to count what is on. So since the 1's above are 4 and the 32 (see how it goes up by a power of two each bit?), we add those up too a total of 36.
ASCII (pronounced ASK-E) is an eight bit system. This is how we translate binary to the symbols, letters and numbers we type, amongst other things. We can compare to a chart of standard ASCII characters.
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is an ASCII chart. So we compare 36 to this chart and find that it is the same as the "$" symbol.Binary is cumulative. So we have two bytes:
00000001 00000001
The last number on the first byte is 128. Since it doubles, the first number on the second byte is 256. So we have the above. It is equal to 257. This does not translate to anything on the standard ASCII or extended ASCII code chart, so this means this is other a more complex set of instructions (say a pixel?) or these are two individual characters meaning both are equal to 1, or null.
From here, it gets much more complex, but this is for the basics. So I am going to leave this at that. You hopefully have what came for. If you have suggestions for improvement or need extra advice, PM me, add me on MSN, AIM or YIM, or drop me an email at:
[email protected]
Hope this helped you.