Blood Diamonds

Binary Math and computers

In the 1940's John Atanasoff came up with the brilliant idea to store and read only two values,on and off. This technology of storing and reading only two states is called binary, and the number system that only uses two digits,0 and1,is called the binary number system. Many people don't realize it ,but binary math has a lot to do with the technology of today. All Computers use binary math to communicate with different components on the system. Every time you strike a key on the keyboard the character is converted to a binary code.

In a binary number system 1 or 0 is called a bit or binary digit. Because of the way the number system is organized, grouping is often done in groups of eight bits, which is called a byte. The word bit is a means binary digit . Computers rely on binary numbers and binary math because it greatly simplifies their tasks. Since there are only two possibilities (0 and 1) for each digit rather than 10, it is easier to store or manipulate the numbers. A simple device like a switch or a transistor that has two distinct states, like "on" and "off," can become a number storage unit or part of a calculator. Computers need a large number of transistors to accomplish all this, but it is still easier and less expensive to do things with binary numbers rather than decimal numbers. The original computers were used primarily as calculators, but later they were used to manipulate other forms of information, such as words and pictures. In each case, engineers and programmers sat down and decided how they were going to represent a new type of information in binary form. It is called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII. In binary numbers each bit holds the value of increasing powers of 2. That makes counting in binary pretty easy.

You can only count up to 1 using the first place. You also then need another place to indicate how many times you have counted to two,so in binary you write two as 10,which is one group of two and no