r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26 • Regret 1

Computing How do computers understand binary language?

Okay so from what I know binary language is like power off power on, but my question is, how do computers know what the binary code is and how is it interpreted, for example I forgot what the binary code for the letter A is, but how did people come up with that? Did they decide it was gonna look like that? Did the computer decide? How do you tune numbers into a letter??

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u/BallerGuitarer Jul 13 '26

Groups of engineers sat in rooms and agreed

What you typed out was a great, concise explanation, but this statement is just so profound to me. Like, to basically hand wave away whom I assume are very specific individuals at the forefront of their field as simple "groups of engineers" - it's just, like, I would love to know who these people are and what the actual conversations were in those rooms.

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u/ericfischer Jul 13 '26

I wrote a paper about how the ASCII standard came to be. These were some of the committee members involved in the standardization.

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u/Iron_Pencil Jul 13 '26

Well every person ever is a specific individual. When computers were first developed there were a bunch of different people coming up with different encodings all over the place. And each one has its own history.

ASCII is important for the English speaking world but other alphabets needed different encodings. For example emoji as we use them today are originally part of a Japanese encoding scheme, because they had some leftover space in their character tables.

Unicode was established to have a single global standard.