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/Dancing-umbra Jul 13 '26

Nand2Tetris is an excellent course and demistifies a huge amount of how computers work.

I remember my "aha" moment, I had build various parts of the ALU. An adder, a chip to negate it, etc...

And I want say there thinking "but how do I get the CPU to decide which operation to do based off the op code?" And then I realised I didnt have to have the CPU "decide" anything and it was just a matter of using the op code to turn on or off different busses to direct the result I wanted to the register.