There are many advantages to binary. Here are four somewhat overlapping important reasons for using binary:. These characteristics of binary were realized by Claude Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Transistors are used in computers to implement switches.
It is the single bit—something we touched upon earlier. Only a single switch is required to implement this configuration memory. You get a byte when eight switches are combined together. Convert into binary online to get a better understanding of this. The switches can be set on and off by the digital hardware. Did you get the answer to your question i. So, why do computers not use this system and use binary instead?
The answer to this is pretty straightforward. This means that just two numbers: 0 and 1, are required by the switches to represent each state. On the other hand, if the computers used the decimal system, there would be ten possible states to a switch. This is time consuming and completely unnecessary. So, to avoid the hassle and make things such as calculations simpler, computers use the binary number system. Now, do you understand why computers use binary numbers instead of decimal numbers?
Now that you know why computers use binary numbers, it is time for you to start converting text into binary. To avoid the hassle of using a physical tool, convert into binary online. All the characters are stored by computers as binary data numbers. The digits: 0 and 1, are used by binary code to represent computer text or instructions and a bit string is assigned to each symbol or instruction.
The assigned strings have the ability to correspond with symbols, letters, or instructions. Encoding data is what these codes are used for in computing. Every number in your computer is an electrical signal, and in the early days of computing, electrical signals were much harder to measure and control very precisely.
Essentially, it only allows current to flow from the source to the drain if there is a current in the gate. This forms a binary switch. Manufacturers can build these transistors incredibly small—all the way down to 5 nanometers, or about the size of two strands of DNA.
Gates take two inputs, perform an operation on them, and return one output. This brings us to the long answer: binary math is way easier for a computer than anything else. Boolean logic maps easily to binary systems, with True and False being represented by on and off. Two inputs are easy to manage.
A binary truth table operating on boolean logic will have four possible outputs for each fundamental operation. But because ternary gates take three inputs, a ternary truth table would have 9 or more. Who knows? In the future, we could begin to see ternary computers become a thing, as we push the limits of binary down to a molecular level.
For now, though, the world will continue to run on binary. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost. Browse All Privacy and Security Articles Browse All Linux Articles Having said that, it is likely the way transistors are arranged and how they perform calculations that is the real reason we have stuck with binary for this long.
Binary math is much easier for a computer to understand than ternary math. If you stack transistor switches together, you create a logic gate. The gate compares two different input types i. This is how computers make decisions and is the basic principle of computer programming, with a program being made up of logical sets of instructions. These operations are based on a branch of mathematics called Boolean algebra.
Boolean Logic states that there are four possible outcomes if you have two possible inputs as in a binary system. Each of the logic gate operations can be expressed in a truth table:. Computers use binary numbers because this is the easiest and simplest way to record and process the electrical currents that run through their hardware.
If there is an electrical current, the transistor switch is on. The transistor switch is off if there is no electrical current. An on switch is represented by a 1 and an off switch by a 0.
Each switch represents one single bit of information, and eight bits are known as a byte. This is how information is stored in computer memory. Ternary systems do exist but are not in common use. Author: Trey Williams.
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