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Understanding Binary

Watch out! This tutorial is over 8 years old. Please keep this in mind as some code snippets provided may no longer work or need modification to work on current systems.

The basic building block in all computers is the binary number system.

This system is chosen since it consists of 1s and 0s only. Since computers contain millions and millions of tiny ‘switches’, which must be in the ON or OFF position, this lends itself logically to the binary system. A switch in the ON position can be represented by 1; a switch in the OFF position can be represented by 0.

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