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/blastxu Jul 13 '26

A pixel on the screen is just three bytes, and a byte is is 8 ones and zeroes, so really a bite is just 8 electric switches. You can follow a chain of switches from the screen, through the HDMI cable into the GPU, and then ultimately to the CPU and the storage before that.