1's & 0's: Note and the first part

NOTE: I pondered which article to write and post first. I want to do one on hard drive storage, one on digital cameras and storage, and others. However, I realized that they all come down to a basic understanding of how computers store information. If you understand that other posts will make a lot more sense. I will put this in plain language but follow along closely—no dozing off! :-)

If you get lost or your eyes start to “glaze over” in this post PLEASE leave a comment or send an email so that I will know! If you are bored at the prospect of reading on, please wait for the future posts on storage in which I will link back to this “base understanding” post. I'm sure I will reference this post often.

This post will be broken up into sub-sections for easier clickability and reading. Enjoy!

=============================================

You may have heard that all a computer “understands” or stores is 1's and 0's. Yup, that's right, all a computer knows or stores is an “on” or an “off”, an electromagnetic charge or discharge, like a light that is on or off. This true/ false or 1/ 0 or on/ off is also called binary, “bi” meaning two or it can be one of two things-- a 1 or a 0.

So what's a 1 or a 0 got to do with storage? Well, let's look at how the characters I am typing and that you are reading on this blog are stored, in their most basic sense, on a computer system. We need to understand how the letter “A” gets stored as 1's and 0's.