4BINARY AND DATA REPRESENTATION
From simple stone tablets and cave paintings to written words and phonograph grooves, humans have perpetually sought to record and store information. In this chapter, we’ll characterize how the latest of humanity’s big storage breakthroughs, digital computing, represents information. We also illustrate how to interpret meaning from digital data.
Modern computers utilize a variety of media for storing information (e.g., magnetic disks, optical discs, flash memory, tapes, and simple electrical circuits). We characterize storage devices later in Section 11.2; however, for this discussion, the medium is largely irrelevant—whether ...
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