Binary code

Topic: Binary Code
Source: Introduction to Technology
by: Allan J. Pierce and Dennis Karwatka

Introduction:

The computer program and all the information that the computer will use must be changed into binary code, which is code that the computer can understand. Two numbers are used in binary code 1(one) and 0 (zero). (Unit 3: Information and Communication Technologies, page 252).

Computer sends and receives these 1s and 0s in the form of small electrical pulses. A 1 means a pulse flows through the circuit and 0 means no pulse. Each 1 and 0 is a bit. Bit is the smallest piece of information a computer can use and stringing these bits together form a byte. Each byte is a code for a letter, number, or punctuation mark represented as 1s and 0s. The computer converts everything that you type into these binary bytes. Computer have to use binary code because electricity on and off which are the only two messages that a computer can sense. Although using binary code seems slow to us, electricity travels very fast and supercomputers can make 20 billion calculations per second.