From the course: Digital Media Foundations
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Why do computers like binary?
From the course: Digital Media Foundations
Why do computers like binary?
- [Voiceover] The beauty of binary is that it allows us to use a very elegant form of mathematics. I'll explain how this works in the next lesson, which I highly recommend you take the time to watch through and really understand. It's not just the elegance of the design though. There's a fundamental problem computers have always struggled with: Reality. In the real world, things are not always fully OFF or ON. In fact they're usually mostly OFF, or, mostly ON. Consider the binary options of light and dark. In reality, a thing is rarely, truly, all light or dark. It's usually "quite dark" or "quite bright." How can a computer decide if a "quite bright" thing is a one, or a "quite dark" thing is a zero. In the case of magnetic hard drives, each one or zero, is stored in its own domain; a little space on the drive that can be magnetically charged with the magnetic polarity set one way or the other. So, set one way, it's a one, and the other way it's a zero. However, it really isn't…
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