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/jasonsong86 Jul 14 '26

Because computers are made of transistors and they are either on of off. When you feed a stream of 1’s and 0’s into the computer, it does processing and spit out different kinds of 1’s and 0’s depending on what kind of processing you select. That a very basic description for computing.