- Computers use digital signals to work, but humans do not think in ‘digital’. We work in words and sentences.
Bits and bytes
- Electronic chips inside a computer work by using two different voltage levels
- 1 for high voltage
- 0 for low voltage
- A single binary digit (a bit) is either a one or a zero
- by grouping these bits (usually in groups of eights, known as a ‘byte’) we can create patterns
- These patterns can then be used to represent instructions which tell a computers processor to do something like:
- Add
- Subtract
- Store some data
- etc.
- 11010011 01110000 11010101 10000111 11111101 01010001 11110001 01111100 11000000
- Humans cannot read these patterns of ones and zeros
Machine code
- The Processor has a fixed number of instructions which it can carry out
- All of the instructions together, which a particular processor can carry out, is known as the ‘machine code’ for that processor.
- Any particular instruction can be represented as a binary pattern.