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nyuckajay t1_isfluze wrote

Reply to comment by countChaiula in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

That’s super sick, the people that figured out ways to make what is essentially a super complex set of switches, and engineer a way for it to interface and write the first code is very neat.

was it something like binary? Then the binary (power and grounds or on/off from the cards) could build into more complex lines of code in the newer stuff?

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countChaiula t1_isfmzd3 wrote

Yes, it's all binary. I believe there were a few experimental computers that used other system, but everything else is binary.

I should point out that outside of computer chips not everything is "binary" in the sense of a signal can be only in one of two states. For instance Ethernet cables can pass many different signal states. How many states depends on the speed of the connection, but it might be something like 64 or 256 different states. This is what makes it so fast. Instead of sending just a 1 or 0, you might send a "34", which actually means 01101, for example, so you are sending five binary values at once instead of just one. I'm hand waving a bit, but that's the idea. When them signal comes into your computer, it ultimately ends up being 0s and 1s again.

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