It should be that in a first year computer science class, students are not required to be able to convert numbers between bases. You will not be expected to figure out that 201 in base-10 converts to 11001001 in base-2 or vice-versa. However, if you are planning a career in technology, especially in the area of networking, then it is definitely an essential skill. We can also add some terminology here. A single bulb can be on or off and this single light represents a single digit in base-2, called a binary digit, which is abbreviated as We also want to give a special name to the row of eight light bit. bulbs (bits) that make up one character. This row shall be called a Keep in byte. mind that is not plural for There is one problem with ASCII’s system of byte bit. storing each character in a single byte. You only have access to 256 different combinations or characters. This may be fine in the United States, but it is very inadequate for the international community. is now becoming very Unicode popular and this code stores characters in 2 bytes. The result is 65,536 different possible characters. Java has adopted Unicode, as have many technical organizations. The smaller ASCII code is a of Unicode. subset Bits, Bytes and Codes Bit is a binary digit that is either 0 (off) or 1 (on). 1 Byte = 8 bits 1 Nibble = 4 bits (½ a byte) 1 Byte has 28 or 256 different numerical combinations. 2 has 216 or 65,536 different numerical combinations. ASCII uses one byte to store one character. Unicode uses two to store one character. Early computers did in fact use one vacuum tube for each bit. Very large machines contained thousands of vacuum tubes with thousands of switches that could change the status of the tubes. Miles of wires connected different groups of vacuum tubes to organize the instructions that the computer had to follow. Early computer scientists had to walk around giant computers and physically connect wires to different parts of the computer to create a set of computer instructions. The incredible advances in computer technology revolve around the size of the bit. In the forties, a bit was a single vacuum tube that burned out very rapidly. Soon large vacuum tubes were replaced by smaller, more reliable, vacuum tubes.
It should be that in a first year computer science class, students are not required to be able to convert numbers between bases. You will not be expected to figure out that 201 in base-10 converts to 11001001 in base-2 or vice-versa. However, if you are planning a career in technology, especially in the area of networking, then it is definitely an essential skill. We can also add some terminology here. A single bulb can be on or off and this single light represents a single digit in base-2, called a binary digit, which is abbreviated as bit. We also want to give a special name to the row of eight light bulbs (bits) that make up one character. This row shall be called a byte. Keep in mind that byte is not plural for bit. There is one problem with ASCII’s system of storing each character in a single byte. You only have access to 256 different combinations or characters. This may be fine in the United States, but it is very inadequate for the international community. Unicode is now becoming very popular and this code stores characters in 2 bytes. The result is 65,536 different possible characters. Java has adopted Unicode, as have many technical organizations. The smaller ASCII code is a subset of Unicode. Bits, Bytes and Codes Bit is a binary digit that is either 0 (off) or 1 (on). 1 Byte = 8 bits 1 Nibble = 4 bits (½ a byte) 1 Byte has 28 or 256 different numerical combinations. 2 has 216 or 65,536 different numerical combinations. ASCII uses one byte to store one character. Unicode uses two to store one character. Early computers did in fact use one vacuum tube for each bit. Very large machines contained thousands of vacuum tubes with thousands of switches that could change the status of the tubes. Miles of wires connected different groups of vacuum tubes to organize the instructions that the computer had to follow. Early computer scientists had to walk around giant computers and physically connect wires to different parts of the computer to create a set of computer instructions. The incredible advances in computer technology revolve around the size of the bit. In the forties, a bit was a single vacuum tube that burned out very rapidly. Soon large vacuum tubes were replaced by smaller, more reliable, vacuum tubes.
Text01-IntroToCS.docx