Why does computers only understand 0s and 1s ?
Computers are electronic devices. They started from 'Vacuum tubes' to 'transistors' to 'Integrated circuits'.
Prabanjan M
Computers
Computers are electronic devices. They started from 'Vacuum tubes' to 'transistors' to 'Integrated circuits'.
Integrated circuits
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon.
credits to Wikipedia
So what 🤔?
So the only thing that a computer can understand is, not just a computer but any electronic device is High/Low or On/Off. So put in simple human terms there are only 2 alphabets in the electrical universe.
As a result of which we humans have accepted to denote them as 0 and 1, where 1 denotes 'High' or 'On' and 0 denote 'Low' or 'Off'. Which left us with no choice but to create equivalent notations for every alphabet with just the 0s and 1s.

Extras 🎁✨
So every thing you are currently looking at in your monitor is actually residing in your system as just a series of On and Off transistors in a strict order.
Everything from characters you see to images, videos, software packages and programs included is residing in your computer as a series of on and Off transistors. That should explain to you the answer to the following questions
- Why do high quality images take up a lot of memory ?
- Why does your system get heated up when you use heavy software packages ?
- Why does it get slow when you feel your laptop got heated up to max?
Thank you for reading this through! 🤩
Please let me know about your thoughts on this article. If you have any questions simillar to this please let me know in the comments.
Have a nice day, 👋
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Prabanjan M
I am a final year student passionate about learning. I started this blog to help other students who are struggling, I share my knowledge on topics which I learned in the hard way so that others can learn it in the easy way.

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