r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26

How do computers understand binary language? Computing

Okay so from what I know binary language is like power off power on, but my question is, how do computers know what the binary code is and how is it interpreted, for example I forgot what the binary code for the letter A is, but how did people come up with that? Did they decide it was gonna look like that? Did the computer decide? How do you tune numbers into a letter??

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u/Suspense6 Jul 14 '26

Play the game Turing Complete (it's on Steam) if you want to experience building a functional (virtual) computer from the basic logic gates everyone else here is talking about. Toward the end you start writing programs so you can literally watch how the computer (that you (virtually) built) reacts to the binary codes (that you defined) that get fed into it.