Binary - All Steemit posts are just numbers!

This might be a hard one to hear! Am I going to talk about post payouts or is this guy out of his mind? What do I really mean by all Steemit posts are just numbers?  If you are feeling curious after a busy Monday, why not hop on for a ride 😎 

(Credit: here)

After talking about how our browser communicate with the server and what makes it possible for our browser to render the Steemit site, today we are going to talk about how that information travels to and fro the server and our computer. If you haven't, check out the two links above to have fun.

Our computer processor

Our computer runs entirely on electricity. There is only 2 values that electricity can take. Either electricity is flowing which means 1 or electricity is not flowing which means 0. Our processor is made of millions of transistors which are semi-conductor materials that allows electricity to either pass through or blocks it. In this way, the processor is able to process logics and display information on our screen.

The ASCII table

Now that we know our processor understands only 0 and 1, our computer need to have a way to convert all letters and symbols into a series of 0 and 1. This has been achieved by the creation of the ASCII table which represents each character by a unique number.

(Credit: here)

To include the French language and other symbols, the extended ASCII table was designed.

(Credit: here)

The table looks rather complex but what we are interested in are the 'Dec' and 'Char' columns. The letter 'A' is denoted by the decimal number 65 and the number '1' is denoted by the decimal number 49. I hope that you have found the letter and number in the table above as we will be using it as a reference for the next part.

The binary headache

So far we have been able to represent each character that exists using a number. But as we know, our processor understands only the numbers 0 and 1 which is called a bit.

Now we will be going into some math but don't worry, I will be making it as simple as possible. Bi means 2 and hence everything is to the power of 2. In order to convert the ASCII table decimal numbers to binary, we use the table above which starts from the left hand side with 2 to the power of 0 till 2 to the power of 7. 

So if I want to convert the letter 'A' to binary, I will take the decimal number from the ASCII table which is 65 and then I will keep dividing it by 2 until I the final result as 0 as show below.

So if we write the remainder in a single line, it will look like this: 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 (LSB). Now if we compare it to the binary digit table, we have the 6th bit which is 1 and the first bit which is 1. If we want to get the decimal number back, it will be the 6th bit which is 64 plus the first bit which is 1, making a total of 65 which represents the letter A.

This is how our computers converts to and fro between binary and decimal, and using the ASCII lookup table, it is able to know what character needs to be displayed on the screen. 

If we look closely to the extended ASCII table, we find that the last character has a decimal value of 255. This is the last character that can be displayed in binary by taking 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128 = 255. This means that all 8 bits are ones like this 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.

The 8 bits together has a special name. It is called a byte. Hence each character is a byte of information. If you type the letter A only in a notepad and saves it, you will see that the file size is 1 byte!

Transmission

All communication that is sent from our computer or any device, is transmitted through copper wires, light (in the case of optical cables) and wirelessly. These communication medium transmit information in waves, which we call analog signals. Now our computers understand only 0 and 1. Since these are the only 2 values that we can send, how are we able to transmit those information across the internet.

Our modem

Modem in itself is the abbreviation of two words which are modulator and demodulator. Our modem, through the modulator process, is able to convert those bits of 0 and 1 into waves. The peak representing a 1 and the trough representing a zero.

(Credit: here)

After this conversion, the analog signal is transmitted either through copper wire, fire optics or wirelessly.

In the same way, when our modem receives an analog signal, it converts that signal back to digital signal by using the demodulator process, which then allows our processor to understand the information and displays the full Steemit post on our browser.

The dilemma

We have seen that the ASCII table is limited to 256 characters but the question remains as to how our processor manipulates other characters like the Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Hindi languages among others. What mechanism has been put in place to cater for such characters. This is what we are going to discuss in my next post.

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(created by @readallaboutit)