Binary code
Since we had a little incident with binary code on Ozami Forums — let’s talk about binary code.
First a couple of words on binary system.
Binary system uses only two digits: 0 and 1.
Our (human) decimal system uses 10 digits: from 0 to 9. Why?
Well, it’s only natural — ten is a nice round number, seems almost important! 
And we have ten fingers — and that’s the way we started to count at first — using fingers.
Now back to binary! Why does it use only two digits?
When first computer-like machines were produced they needed to have some kind of a memory to store data. They also needed some carriers for the data between differrent parts of the computer.
They were made from differrent matterials over the years but they had something similair — they always had two stable states. The easiest way to describe these two states was using 0 and 1.
And since electricity (and now even light) was chosen as the carrier it was again logical to use 0 and 1.
0 = no current
1 = current present
Easy!
And we could even get all of our numbers into the binary system.
Binary 0 is also decimal 0. Binary 1 is also decimal 1.
So decimal 2 is binary 10. Decimal 3 is 11 and so on.
Furthermore in binary 1+1=10.
That should give you a picture of how it works.
Back to the binary code
But we use letters and special signs on the computer too. So we needed to show them with 0 and 1.
There are many different standards for encoding letters into binary digits.
But the most common way is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).
It uses 8 binary digits to describe one letter or special sign.
So that’s what binary code is all about — nothing special!
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