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

it's a common theme throughout the modern world that everything in a computer's brain comes down to ones and zeros you've most likely heard that this code of ones and zeros is what's referred to as binary and while almost everybody knows that this is somehow related to what computers do very few of us seem to understand what binary is or why computers use it if you want to know then this video is for you because it's actually a very simple concept and still quite fascinating before we get to computers let's talk about what binary itself is

as it existed long before computers did binary is nothing more than a system of counting to understand how it works let's look at two other systems of counting cally marks and the glourious based and positional that we all know and love today tally marks are the simplest counting system imaginable however many things you have you put down that mini marks easy as pie but not very efficient meanwhile based in positional which is what we use today uses a different symbol to represent different amounts of things with the numbers 0 through 9 we can recognize that

each symbol indicates a different amount of things if we need to represent something higher than nine we add a digit to the left world its first digit back to zero and start over the system is very efficient compared to tally marks because each digit we add exponentially increases the amount of things we can represent 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 ones we have the number of tens the number of hundreds the number of thousands and so on

now this is probably something you already know but it's very important to keep it in mind when we talk about binary now binary works the exact same way is based in positional but instead of each digit going from 0 to 9 it goes from 0 to 1 counting upwards and binary sounds like this 0 1 1011 100 101 110 111 and 1000 because each digit of binary has only two values and not and each additional digit represents an increasing power of two rather than an increasing power of 10 so this is the number of ones

we have the number of twos fours 8 16 32 64 128 and so on not nearly as efficient is based in but exponentially more efficient than tally marks literally so now that we know how binary works let's talk about computers why did the first computer creators as wise and intelligent as they are waste their time with such an ineffective system of counting well it's because of a physical limitation on how computers work everything a computer does comes down to what's known as micro transistors simple tiny ain't CBSE little switches that can either be on or

off and can be flipped on or off with a very weak electrical charge the first goal is to get computers to count and to get them to count by using these switches we could use the tally system meaning the number of on switches equals the number of things we have or we could use the much more efficient system of binary where each switch represents a digit of binary a transistors using the tally system could represent a number as large as eight by turning all of them on with binary we can represent a number as high

as 255 a nonce which means a 1 and an off switch means a zero now is a good time to mention that a single transistor is what's known as a bit which stands for binary digit a byte is eight of these bits in a row which means any number between 0 and 255 so if binary is just a system of counting what do people mean when they explain how to spell things in binary well what they really mean is how to spell things with ASCII the American Standard Code for information interchange is a way to

convert a computer's data which can only be in numbers and turn it into letters for humans to have an easier time to work with ASCII 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 senses for example the corresponding ASCII number for an uppercase a is 65 a 65 in base 10 is equal

to 1 million in 1 in binary so whenever you type in an uppercase a in a word program a coding program or a scripting program or whatever somewhere there's a little tiny row of eight transistors arranged in the pattern of off on off off off off off on which represents zero one zero zero zero zero zero one and binary which is interpreted as 65 and base 10 which is converted by ASCII into an uppercase a you're likely starting to get a feel for the staggering amount of transistors required to write something as simple as a

facebook status let alone all the different coding that your computer has to do to make the screen light up play games calculate massive values and so on well long before we got to the point where your phone can play three-dimensional games it became clear that numbers as high as 255 just weren't going to cut it regardless of how many bytes we had and it was a lot even adding four fully active bytes together could only get a number as high as 1020 to solve this problem new computers were designed to recognize two bytes as one

single number so now instead of referencing one line of eight transistors computers could reference two lines giving 16 digits worth of binary this was a huge help because it increased the amount of representable numbers exponentially from 255 up to 65535 when you hear people talking about the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit this is more or less it but that doesn't mean that a 16-bit system is exponentially that much more powerful because your program isn't always gonna be utilizing all of these numbers in each byte that it represents it just has the option to which opens

up lots of doors well this could go on for ages and ages but I want to end this particular video right here so it's not to be overwhelming in future videos I will explain how computers use these numbers to decide which pixel is what color on your monitor with the different components of your computer r4 and how hard drives store binary digits on a spinning disk rather than in transistors thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video liking and subscribing is always a huge help well I've been enjoying making these instructional videos I

might move into a different channel soon and continue doing comedic gaming related things on this channel so as not to confuse YouTube's search algorithm which I think I am