Students' Guide to Information Technology, 2nd Edition

Computers

Question

2 Look at what

I said

above about the computer's representation of A, B,

C, and D. What sequence of switches do you think is used to store the

letter

E?

Binary numbers

Each of these sequences of

Os

and Is is an item of numerical data. It is

because computers reduce all information to data in this form that the

term data

processing is

normally applied to them, rather than

information

processing.

You have probably met numbers that use just the two digits 0 and 1

in your school maths. They are called

binary

numbers.

They relate to

our ordinary decimal numbers as follows:

Decimal Binary

zero 0

one 1

two 10

three 11

four 100