Bits & Bytes Demystified
Learn binary through mental models, not memorization
Everything is Numbers
You're looking at text right now. But your computer doesn't see letters, words, or sentences. It sees numbers. Specifically, it sees sequences of zeros and ones — bits — that represent everything from this text to the colors on your screen to the emojis you send.
Here's the key insight: computers only understand two things — on and off.
From this simple foundation, we've built everything: numbers, text, images, music, videos, and even AI. Understanding how this works demystifies the entire digital world.
Why This Matters
When you understand bits and bytes, you understand why images have file sizes, why emoji can break older systems, why hexadecimal colors exist, and why "256 values" keeps showing up everywhere in computing.
This isn't just theory — it's the foundation that makes everything else make sense.
Binary Thinking
How 0s and 1s become any number
Text Encoding
How letters become bytes
Visual Data
How colors and images are stored
What You'll Learn
- →How binary works and why computers use it
- →What bytes are and why we have KB, MB, GB
- →The journey from ASCII to Unicode to UTF-8
- →Why emojis are more complex than they seem
- →How RGB colors work at the byte level
- →How images are just grids of numbers
Ready to see how a simple on/off switch becomes the digital world?
Let's start with the basics: bits and binary.