BITS OF BYTES.

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IGCSE / GCSE Computer Science

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1 - Theory of Computer Science / Understanding Binary

UNDERSTANDING BINARY

Why do computers use Binary numbers?

​Computers can only understand 2 things... Power on and Power o@!
Power on = 1
​Power o9 = 0
​As there are only two possible states, the base 2 binary system is perfect for computers. Everything
that a computer will process, receive or display has to be converted into binary.
 UNITS OF MEMORY

Unit Name Memory value

1 Bit A single 1 or 0

1 Nibble 4 Bits

1 Byte 8 Bits

1 KB 1024 Bytes

1 MB 1024 KB

1 GB 1024 MB

1 TB 1024 GB

BINARY CONVERSION

​To understand binary numbers further, we need to know how to convert them. We need to convert them
both from Binary to denary and vice versa.

​To begin you should write out the numbers from left to right 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1... WHY these numbers?
You simply double the number each time starting from 1 and working from right to left.

​Once you have this table you can use it to convert binary to denary AND denary to binary

​Lets say that you have been asked to convert the Binary number 00011011 into a denary (Base 10) number​...

​Step 1 = Draw out a table with the numbers mentioned above

​Step 2 = Write out the binary number 00011011 into the table, below the aforementioned numbers

​See the table below...

 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
128

O O O 1 1 O 1 1

Once you have this table with your binary number inserted, you can complete the conversion by adding up
the numbers that have a 1 below them. so in this example we would need to perform the following
calculation:

​16 + 8 + 2 + 1 = 27

​So the answer is 00011011 in denary = 27

BIGGER NUMBERS AND BINARY

​You may have noticed that the biggest number that can be made with one byte is 255 and that you can
make 256 di@erent numbers If you include 0.

​But what if you want a number bigger than 256?? surely this is limited...

​Well to solve this you can us more bits to represent higher numbers. What this means is that instead of
using 1 byte (8 bits) to represent a denary number we can use 2 bytes (16 bits).

​How?

​The method for doing this is exactly the same as using one byte. You still write down the table with the
numbers 128, 64, 32, 8, 4, 2, 1 however you continue with another 8 numbers that double from 128...
confused? see the table below.

3276 1638
8192 4096 2048 1024 512 256 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
8 4
 La solution aux problèmes M
Détruisez les 9chiers inutiles e
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