How does the binary system work? An introduction
Before you start reading this article, I want you to take a trip back into your past when you were being taught the decimal system. Personally, when I was in elementary school (in the 70’s/80’s), teachers used to use a column system to teach us about numbers:
[Thousands] | [Hundreds] | [Tens] | [One]
1 2 3 4
The number 1234 is - 1 Thousands, 2 Hundreds, 3 Tens and 4 Ones.
A few years later, we learned about the composition of the decimal system in a more complex way.
Thousands became 10^3 (10*10*10)
Hundreds became 10^2 (10*10)
… and so on.
1234 then became:
((1*10^3)+(2*10^2)+(3*10^1)+(4*10^0))
As you already know, counting in decimals is done by using 10 digits, from 0 to 9. Each time we jump a “column” (from 9 to 10), we add 1 digit to our total and reset all subsequent numbers to 0 (999 becomes 1000). The binary system works exactly the same way, but instead of using digits that goes from 0 to 9, we keep things simple and only use 0’s and 1’s, just like computers do. But the question you are probably asking yourself now is why do computers only use 0’s and 1’s? The answer is simple: electronic circuits. Circuits that make the wheel inside your computer turn can only have 2 states, on and off. Since a computer is mostly made out of electronic circuitry, it is logical that it uses the binary system to send, receive or compute information.
How does the binary system work?
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