Die shot of an Intel Mobile Pentium II
Destinations
Quick jump
I am going to try and explain how a computer works from the ground up. I am mostly writing this blog post as an exercise for myself in case I get asked it in future interviews and even from friends.
The Basics: Binary Data
You may or may not know this but data in electronics or any sort of technology is stored in 1’s and 0’s. Binary is just a way to represent numbers. In our day to day life, we use the decimal system (most likely because we have 10 digits on both our hands). In decimal, you count up and when you reach the maximum, you go back to zero and increment the next digit to its left (after 9, it’s 10), and the total value is the addition of each digit multiplied by your base (10) exponent the position of the digit in the number.
Binary works the same way however, we use base 2 which means there are only two possible values for each digit: 1 or 0 and you use the 2 as a multiplier.
In other words a random binary number is: