The heart of computers is the ‘CPU’, the central processing unit. It controls all the processes in the computer. Everything that happens is broken down in simple datasets. Computers know only two switching states, which are expressed by numbers: 1 stands for ‘power on’, 0 for ‘power off’. All the data stored in the computer is encoded with different combinations of both these digits, the binary code – ‘binary’ means ‘two’. For instance, when we press ‘a’ on the computer, it is then converted into the number sequence 1100001: The last position stands for 1, the second last for 2, the third for 4, followed by 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on. The positions occupied by ‘1’ are counted, for the number sequence for ‘a’, it will be 1+32+64= 97. The code for ‘a’ is, therefore, 97. All data can be coded in this way – computers, therefore, actually calculate only with ‘1’ and ‘0’.
