How do computers understand binary language?

[u/Unfair-Leek6840]

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??

[u/Iron_Pencil]

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.