Computers are all around us. From our laptops to our everyday smartphones. A computer is an electronic device that reads and processes data. The father of a computer was Charles Babbage. He came up with the idea but never built it. He called it a tabulating engine. It was designed to do arithmetic or math operations. Some computers can fill up rooms. They are so big!! Now, computers have become so small that modern day smartphones are computers too! Computers play a big role in everyday life from calling your friend to finding the biggest prime number!
Computers work using a series of 0’s and 1’s. This is called binary code. This is what computers understand! This binary code tells the computer’s processor, or brain what to do. The 1 represents an “on” command and a 0 represents an “off” command. These on and off commands tell the processer what to do and what to display on your computer screen! Did you know that images and letters that you see on the computer, like on this blog post, are all made up of 0’s and 1’s? It’s true! The letter “A” in binary is 01000001!
“Spectacular Science” in binary form is: 0101001101010000010001010100001101010100010000010100001101010101010011000100000101010010 01010011010000110100100101000101010011100100001101000101
Whew! That took forever! Luckily, we use programming languages, like Java and Python, instead of coding using 0’s and 1’s!