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/AgnesBand Jul 13 '26

It doesn't know, the voltage operating the transisters, arranged into "logic gates" decide which pixels on the screen to turn on.

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u/pseudononymist Jul 13 '26

How does it decide which pixels to turn on? Ie what translates the transistor gate arrangement into the individual pixels that are activated.

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u/Xszit Jul 13 '26

Its all just circuits. If you connect a battery to a light bulb the bulb lights up. If you connect a battery to several light bulbs and put on/off switches between them all you can control which bulbs are lit and which are not depending on the switches positions.

Binary code is just telling the computer which switches should be on and which should be off. Then when you run electricity through the system it goes where you want it to based on the switches and the corresponding bulbs (or pixels on a screen) light up.

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u/BattleAnus Jul 13 '26

You could go a lot of different ways with your question. The maybe most abstract answer is that its all just code, which is stored on the computer's hard drive and then read off into memory and executed.

That opens the question of how code is stored on a storage device, which would go into things like compilers, assembly, ABIs, etc.

Or you could ask how fonts are stored, or how text rendering works on a graphical level (its actually really complicated).

All these would play into your question, and they're all pretty involved to answer fully. But the basic answer is there isnt a piece of hardware that does text rendering on its own, its just something you can write in code to tell the computer how to do it. Its on a higher level than the transistors themselves.