How do computers store pictures, words, and music as numbers?
Secret Number Kingdom
How do computers store pictures, words, and music as numbers?
Open up any computer, peek behind the screen, and you'll find a surprising secret: there are no pictures in there. No words. No music. Just numbers — oceans of them, marching past so fast they pretend to be a cat video. So how does plain old counting turn into a song, a sentence, a sunset? Let's follow the numbers and find out.
First, a twist: computers don't even count the way we do. We have ten digits, zero through nine. A computer has exactly two: 0 and 1. Think of a light switch — off or on, dark or bright, nothing in between. Every number a computer knows is just a long row of these switches. That's it. That's the whole alphabet.
