160 Inverting the Paradox of Excellence
The core of the computer is an arrangement made of transistors. All information in the computer
is held by capacitors, tiny devices able to hold energy or to release it, to be on or off. Computers are
digital devices. Everything is created from 0s and of 1s. Every capacitor needs something to switch
it on or off. Transistors are such switches. By a convention used universally, the American Standard
Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) denes the alphabet, numbers, and many special sym-
bols as xed binary values. For example, the capital letter A has the value of 10000001. These eight
bits of information are treated as one unit, called a byte. To hold this number, eight capacitors and
transistors a ...