also known as binary, like: 01100101. We call these bits. 8 bits make up a byte of information.

Binary is one of many ways infromation is handled but there are many other ways we or machines can communicate. There is an excellent and free course on Khan Academy about Information Theory that we highly recommend checking out!

The above bit sequence 01100101 gives the number 101. When working with textual information, each character and sign has a numeric value. In this case, the number 101 represents the character e, based on the ASCII standard.

How does the binary number system work?

A bit can take up only 2 values: 0 or 1.

Let's take the above bit sequence:

The bit sequence contains the decimal value of 101. The highest decimal number we can store using 8 bits (in 1 byte of information) is 255. That is 256 different numbers, including zero.

128 + 64 + 32 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 255

256 values are enough to assign a numeric value to each letter in the English alphabet and then some.

Like the letter "e", represented by the numeric value of 101.

If we want to include larger decimal numbers, we will have to add more bits into the bit sequence. The standard approach is to add as many additional bytes (8 bits) so that the number fits into the sequence.

Example:

256 = 00000001 00000001