Tekstitykset
if you lift the lid of a computer you will see a circuit board into which a number of little boxes have been plugged each box contains a chip which consists of thousands of microscopic electric circuits each of which can be either on or off this is the only language that the computer understands is one of my circuits on or off a sequence of several arms and offs and various combinations can represent any number or letter or graphic symbol and we can symbolize these barns and offs by using a 1/2 stand for on and a 0 to stand for off most computers can represent any of the symbols on their keyboards by various combinations for a total of exactly eight ones and zeros since this language or code is based on 2 digits 1 or 0 just as a bicycle is based on 2 wheels or a biplane is based on two pairs of wings it is called the binary code from the latin word binaries meaning two together and each of the ones and zeros is called a binary digit or bit for short so it takes 8 bits to represent any keyboard character such a group of 8 bits is called a byte one byte is the equivalent of one character this computer can store or remember roughly 32,000 bytes that means you can feed a program into it that uses up to 32,000 characters letters numbers or graphic symbols just as a kilometer is a thousand meters and a kilogram is a thousand grams so is a kilobyte roughly a thousand bytes this computer therefore has a 32 kilobyte memory or a 32 k memory for short but the memory of most small personal computers can be extended to at least double that 64 K this may sound a lot but it isn't the average page of a book contains about 2,000 characters it's a 2 K page so even a 64 K computer can only store as many characters as a 32-page buck and a 32 K computer only as many as a 16 page book although of course a computer can do a lot more with its characters than a book can but that's another story