Why Do Computers Use 1s and 0s? Binary and Transistors Explained.

It is a common theme throughout the modern world that everything in a computer brain boils down to ones and zeros, chances are you have heard that this code of ones and zeros is what is known as

binary

and although almost all The world knows that this is somehow related to What do

computers

do? Very few of us seem to understand what

binary

is or why

computers

use it. If you want to know, this video is for you because it's actually a very simple concept and it's still quite fascinating. Before we get to computers, let's talk about what binary is. itself is how it existed long before computers did.

Binary is nothing more than a counting system to understand how it works. Let's look at two other counting systems. The counting marks and the glorious based and positional that we all know and love today. Tally marks are the simplest counting system imaginable, no matter how many things you have, you write down those mini marks, very easy but not very efficient, meanwhile, based on positional, which is what we use today, use a different symbol to represent different quantities of things with the numbers from 0 to 9 that we can. Recognize that each symbol indicates a different number of things.

If we need to represent something greater than nine, we add a digit to the world on the left. Its first digit returns to zero and we start again. The system is very efficient compared to tally marks because every digit we add. The number of things we can represent exponentially increases because in this system we add a new digit every ten things each digit represents an increasing power of ten this is a number of units we have the number of tens the number of hundreds the number of thousands and So Now this is probably something you already know, but it's very important to keep in mind when we talk about binary.

Now binary works exactly the same way, it is based on positional, but instead of each digit going from 0 to 9, it goes from 0 to 1 counting up and binary sounds like this 0 1 1011 100 101 110 111 and 1000 because each digit of binary has only two values ​​and no, and each additional digit represents an increasing power of two instead of an increasing power of 10, so this is the number of ones we have the number of two fours 8 16 32 64 128 and so on on, not as efficient, but exponentially more efficient than tally marks, literally, so now that we know how the binary system works, let's talk about computers, why did the first creators of computers do it?

No matter how wise and intelligent they are, they waste time with such an inefficient counting system. Well, it is due to a physical limitation in the functioning of computers. Everything a computer does comes down to what are known as micro

transistors

, simple, tiny, aren't they little CBSE switches that can be on or off and can be turned on or off with a very weak electrical charge. The first goal is to make the computers count and to make them count using these switches, we could use the counting system, which means that the number of switches on is equal. the number of things we have or could use the much more efficient binary system, where each switch represents one digit of the binary.

Transistors using the tally system could represent a number as large as eight by turning them all on with the binary we can represent. a number as high as 255 a nonce meaning a 1 and an off switch meaning a zero now is a good time to mention that a single transistor is what is known as a bit meaning binary digit a byte is eight of these bits in a row meaning any number between 0 and 255, so if binary is just a counting system, what do people mean when they explain how to spell things in binary? What they really mean is how to spell things with ASCII, the American standard code for information interchange.

It is a way to convert computer data that can only be in numbers into letters so that humans have an easier time working with ASCII. It simply assigns a character to each value represented by a byte of binary because a byte has eight digits. of binary to work with and eight digits of binary can represent up to 255 values ​​ASCII had 255 letters symbols to choose from more than enough for the entire alphabet punctuation marks and other meanings for example the corresponding ASCII number for a capital letter a is 65 to 65 in base 10 is equal to 1 million in 1 in binary, so every time you type a capital a in a Word program, or a coding program, or a scripting program, or whatever, somewhere there's a little row of eight

transistors

arranged in the off, on, off, off pattern. off off off on which represents zero one zero zero zero zero one and binary which is interpreted as 65 and base 10 which is converted using uppercase ASCII you are probably starting to get an idea of ​​the staggering number of transistors required to write something as simple as a Facebook status let alone all the different coding your computer has to do to get the screen to light up, play games, calculate massive values, etc., long before we get to the point where your phone can play games in three dimensions.

In gaming it became clear that numbers as high as 255 were simply not going to be enough no matter how many bytes we had and it was a lot, even adding four fully active bytes could only get you a number as high as 1020 to solve this problem. The new computers were designed to recognize two bytes as a single number, so now, instead of referencing a line of eight transistors, computers could reference two lines giving 16 digits in binary. This was very helpful because it exponentially increased the number of representable numbers from 255 to more. to 65535 when you hear people talk about the difference between 8 bits and 16 bits, this is more or less, but that doesn't mean that a 16 bit system is exponentially more powerful because your program is not always going to work.

By using all of these numbers in each byte it represents, you only have the choice, which opens a lot of doors. Well, this could go on for years and years, but I want to end this particular video right here so it's not overwhelming. Future videos I will explain how computers use these numbers to decide which pixel is which color on your monitor with the different components of your r4 computer and how hard drives store binary digits on a spinning disk instead of transistors. Thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video, liking and subscribing is always a big help.

I have enjoyed making these instructional videos. I may move to another channel soon and continue doing comedy game related stuff on this channel so as not to confuse YouTube's search algorithm, which I think. Am