How Computers Think

Inside a computer, data and information are stored in a digital binary format. With the term bit we are referring to a binary digit that represents the smallest piece of data. Homo sapiens can understand and remember words, numbers or pictures; computers understand and use only patterns of bits. One bit of information can have only two possible values. Digit one or digit zero. Therefore, a bit is used to represent only two states. For instance, a light switch can be either On or Off, so in binary system, these conditions would match to 1 and 0 respectively. PCs use binary numbers to represent letters, numbers and other characters. A universally used code system is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). With this system, every character is created by a string of bits. For instance: Capital letter: A = 01000001 Number: 0 = 00000000 Number: 255 = 11111111 Character: # = 00100011 Every set of eight bits, like the representations of letters and special characters, is called a byte. Binary codes are used to represent practically any kind of digital info. With the binary system we can represent computer graphics, pictures, video, music and voice. As mentioned earlier, one bit is the smallest unit of data. One byte is the most basic unit of digital storage. One byte contains 8 bits and is the smallest unit of measure used to represent data storage capacity. When we are talking about hard disk capacity, we use the terms byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte and so on. One kilobyte contains 1,024 bytes. One megabyte contains more than a million bytes, specifically 1,048,576. One gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes and etc. As a general rule, when we represent something digitally, when we need more details we also need more bits to represent the extra information. A low-resolution digital photo will use around 250 KB, but a high-resolution digital photo could use 3 MB or more. Megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes are usually used to describe the size or storage capacity of a storage device. Nowadays we use a great variety of devices to store our data; random access memories (RAM), hard disk drives, CDs, and DVDs. One of the benefits of digital data is that we can transmit them over long distances without losing any quality. A device called modem is used to convert the binary data into a form suitable for transmitting through the telephone line. A cable is a common medium that use pulses of electricity through copper lines. Fiber optic cables use pulses of light over fibers made usually from glass.

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