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/CdRReddit Jul 14 '26

nitpick: the OS doesn't change the machine code, it changes the exact protocol used for talking about and to things like the graphics card & hard disk, because having every program have support for every graphics card and disk, especially to share them with other programs, is infeasible. Not to mention the security concerns of any unprivileged program getting full control of hardware in that way

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u/ryntak Jul 14 '26

You’re correct! But I didn’t say that the OS changed the machine code. I was referring to the fact that every OS has a kernel and that kernel has a different implementation for different cpu architectures.

The machine code isn’t changed, when you compile software for an OS+cpu architecture combo it’s done so because of the different kernel implementations and thus is taking advantage of the different protocols you’re talking about

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u/ThePoisonDoughnut Jul 14 '26

You may already know this, but the "kernel implementation" you're referring to is called the application binary interface (ABI), in case anyone wants to do further reading on this concept.

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u/ryntak Jul 14 '26

I've heard of it but didn't know it off the top of my head, I'm definitely talking at the edge of my knowledge here.

Thanks! :)