Week 2: Clear

Communicating in the Business Environment

In the world of computers it’s all about the 1s and 0s. Computers save, communicate, and process data using the binary number system. In this system there are only ones and zeros which, depending on the place and order in which they are aligned, mean different things. Starting from the right, there is a “one’s place”, a “two’s place”, a “four’s place” and so on. The pattern is simply taking 2 to the next higher power which defines the “place”. So for example 2^3=8 and represents the “eight’s place”. Through this system any binary number can be “decoded” to a regular number as we know them outside of the world of computers. For example, 101 converts to a 5. How? There is a 1 in the far left spot which is the 2²=4 place. That gives us 1*4. There is a zero in the 2¹=2 place leaving us with 0*2. Finally, there is a 1 in the 2⁰=1 place leaving us with 1*1. Summing up yields: 1*4+0*2+1*1=5. With this basic logic you and I can convert binary numbers into regular numbers and vice versa.

The ones and zeros mentioned above are then organized systematically. A BIT is a binary digit and a one-digit number. This means that every zero or one is a BIT. The next higher level of aggregation is a BYTE, which is 8 BITS. Because every BIT can be a zero or one (2 options) and a BYTE consists of 8 BITS, a BYTE can represent 2^8=256 different values. This system extends to even higher levels, summarized in the table below, inspired by the one in Prof. Olson’s lecture.

Unit	Abbreviation	Size
BIT		1 digit, 1 or 0
BYTE		8 Bits
Kilobyte	KB	210 Bytes (≈Thousands)
Megabyte	MB	220 Bytes (≈ Millions)
Gigabyte	GB	230 Bytes (≈ Billions)
Terabyte	TB	240 Bytes (≈Trillions)
Petabyte	PB	250 Bytes(≈Quadrillions)

The final issue I want to address is communication. How do computers around the world communicate with each other? One early way of doing this was ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers would store character data using this standardized code and could decode it using the same process. However, real world challenges transferred to the world of computers: different languages have different signs and symbols and ASCII just didn’t code enough or all of these symbols. The solution is Unicode, which a coding scheme that avoids international compatibility problems. This way a computer in China can communicate with one in the USA in a way that the users in front of the screen (hopefully) understand each other. The bottom line is: 1s and 0s suffice for computers to communicate any data with each other. Compare that to the thousands of words in the English language and consider how often we still misunderstand each other…

Photo by Brero on flickr.com. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dark_imp666/2118575433/sizes/o/in/photostream/