Randolph West has a primer for us:
The CPU can only work with small amounts of data at a time. When the CPU is done with that data, it puts it in memory. Depending on how that data is managed (the on-or-off bit of information is literally called a bit because computer scientists are great at naming things), it usually forms part of a byte, which by convention is eight bits. In other words, you get eight bits of information per byte, represented by a series of 1s (electricity flowed for a fixed period of time) and 0s (no electricity flowed for that fixed period of time).
The uppercase “A” in the Latin alphabet, using the ASCII standard, is represented by the byte
01000001.So, cool, this is binary. What does it actually mean?
Read on for more.