Answer to Question #122148 in Assembler for Ali

Question

Why microprocessor uses the binary number system and not the decimal or any other number system? How microprocessors deal with text, computer program, images, audio and video type of data using only binary number systems?

Answer 1

A microprocessor is an electronic device, and it understands only two things: on and off. Therefore, it uses the binary number system (0, 1), because they represent two different voltages. One as low voltage and the other as high voltage.

Information on a computer can be represented in various ways: in the form of a picture, text, sound, etc.

The text consists of characters, so the symbol can be considered the minimum element of text. If you collect all the possible characters that may appear in the text: letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc., and assign each of these characters a unique number (the so-called character code), then the text can be written as a set of numbers.

Sound represents a wave. To recreate the sound, it is necessary to record the amplitude at certain intervals. The shorter the intervals, the more accurate the sound description.

The image consists of many points (pixels) of different colors. Encode each color with a certain number, specify the location for the pixel, you can present the image as a sequence of numbers.

To make an image, there is one data point per pixel. To move the video, you do it 25 or 30 times per second.

All of this data can be represented by numbers, which means that they can be represented in binary form.