Binary System

I bet sometimes you wonder how a computer takes in information. It thinks faster than a human can so it has to be smarter... On the contrary, a computer can only understand two things, on and off. To use a computer, you can't really keep turning it on and off to send and recieve information, it isn't really practical. Try doing that with your monitor, not so much fun. This is where the Binary System comes in.

You've probably heard or read something about computers and the numbers 1's and 0's. How do they relate? Since a computer can only understand on and off, the Binary System made on and off into 1's and 0's. 1 as in on and 0 as in off. This way you don't have to turn your computer off and on just to get information. The Binary is in the base 2 system, meaning it only has two numbers. Normally, people use the base 10 system, which has 10 numbers.

When you hit the A key on the keyboard, the computer doesn't understand that you're saying A. It understands a code given to the letter a which is made of 1's and 0's. Each key on your keyboard has a different code given to it. Each sound in a song has a different code, and the code is all the computer understands. It doesn't know you're listening to music.

We use place value like this:
10000 1000 100 10 1

Binary Place value goes like this:
32 16 8 4 2 1

If you wanted to make the computer understand the number 24, you would have an 'on' or a 1 in the 16 and 8 place value and a 0, or 'off', for the numbers that are not needed.

16 8 4 2 1
1 1 0 0 0

So the computer understands that 11000 is 16 in Binary.

Every piece of information that goes on your computer is called a bit.
8 bits = 1 byte
1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte
1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte
1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte
1 kilobyte actually has 1024, but it's rounded off to 1000. So when you get a new computer with 80GB of harddisk space, and it only has 74, the extra bytes were not rounded, but taken off.