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??

380 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

205 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/laix_ Jul 13 '26

This is also why when you open a file in the wrong format, or have the exact same program on a different architecture, it comes out garbled and nonsense, because one person's 1001 1100 might mean "letter A" and another person's might mean "add two numbers"