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Introduction to Computers - Part 2
Digital Logic: Representing in Numbers
Welcome back! So now we know everything a computer does is calculations. but what does it calculate and how ? Let's dive into it.
We've got many types of systems, Binary, Decimal, Octal and Hexadecimal, we're all familiar with the decimal number system having 10 digits, 0 to 9 therefore called base 10 system(10 digits). We all know the decimal system so why don't we use it and why binary ?(base 2 system), because of the transistors. We know that a transistor has only two states on and off so to represent that we use the binary system, 0 representing off and 1 representing on states. Hexadecimal system has digits from 0-f, i.e 0-9, then a represents 10, b represents 11 and so on till f which represents 15.
Representing in Binary
Basically, a computer compares 1s and 0s billions of times a second, everything we see is represented in terms of 1s and 0s. Let us take an example of a screen, the screen you see in front of you is actually a collection of pixels or minute boxes with each box having a different colour and together forms the visual we see. and each colour can be expressed in terms of the primary colours red, green and blue and their varied intensities creates all colours. This in turn can be represented as numbers(binary). Those numbers tell the computer how fully to turn on each of the primary colour "lights" in an individual pixel. If red was set to 0, that means the red "light" is completely off. If the red "light" was set to 255, that would mean the "light" was fully on.
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| Word CAT represented in Binary |
What is up with 0 and 255 ?
So each 0 or 1, is called a bit and in the earlier days of computing, we utilized 8 bits or a combination of 8 digits of 0s and 1s (1 byte) to represent a character. So we could represent 2^8 characters i.e. 256 (0 to 255 values). Each character was assigned a value called an ASCII value and that value could be represented by a byte. But then more and more characters came into being, like the emojis and we needed more values, so other encoding formats were used, the most prevalent encoding standard used now is the UTF-8 standard, it used the same ASCII values, but what set it apart is that it allowed to use multiple bytes, to represent a single character than a single byte.
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| Emoji Represented in Hexadecimal which can be further expressed in binary |
So that's a lot to take in, take it in and think it through, how complicated but simple isn't it ? So next let's begin to dive into some more hardware and begin to understand how this voltage or the 0s and 1s travel around and make sense, in our next article!
Akhil Hakkim
S1- IT (2020-2024)
Thursday, February 11, 2021
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Introduction to Computers
Akhil Hakkim
S1-IT, 2020-24
Introduction to Computers
It's quite overwhelming to look into the rate at which new innovations that change the way we live keep popping up.
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| Moore's Law Graph (Our world in Data) |
With the development in technology, so has grown the user base and feasibility. The growth has been absolutely exponential. So what next, development is unpredictable, we have newer fields being discovered every day, newer skills developed, newer challenges faced and newer solutions.
So what can we consider led to the development of all the latest technology, while there may be many factors, one of them certainly is the computing power. With the onset of transistors(yes the thingy that goes on and off based on the flow of current
) and the ever decreasing sizes of chips(not the eating kind
) and the improvement, we were able to store and process more, which is the fundamental element of any new age technology. So it is very crucial to understand what happens to our computer at the hardware level and that is what we'll be seeing through our next series of articles.
What exactly is a Computer ?
Fun fact: Before computers were commercially available, a person who used to perform calculations were known as computers.
So connecting with that meaning, we can tell a computer is a device that stores and processes data by performing calculations. Yes, the computers we use for all sorts of purposes are just very fast calculators, and in fact, the earliest known computers were the Abacus where the user had to perform calculations.
Okay I think that will be okay for the introduction, it might be a lot to take in but hurray! Thankyou for staying till the last and keep waiting for the next section.
List of References:
