Computer Fundamentals

Research Found by: Kaedun and Khush

How Computers store data? 

Kaedun- Binary data is stored on the hard disk drive. The device is made up of a spinning disk that can both read and write information in the form of patterns. There are various types of data storage tools which saves our data and information. One worldwide known data storage tool is the USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drive. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optic disc. Most USB's weigh under 30g. It is very easy to share and store information. A USB flash drive can be attached to a USB port and provides a certain amount of storage space, which is used to store data. Flash drives are found in homes, workspaces, businesses and schools.

Khush- Back then in 1995, pictures were four megabytes each and not many videos. With other applications and files, that would add up to half a gigabyte (GB). Now, we have thousands of pictures of at least five megabytes, a video starts at about 65 megabytes per minute, then including music, Microsoft 10 needs at least 60 gigabytes and installed office 365 would add three gigabytes. Adding up games, documents, applications and business apps. In 20 years, our need for data storage has grown over 1000 times bigger. Imagine how much storage would you need in the next five years or a decade.

What is compression?

Kaedun- Compression means increasing a source of pressure, for example, volume, gas or an engine, etc. In terms of data compression, it is a process whilst the size of a file is reduced by encoding the file data again so that you can use less amount of storage than the original file. Data compression also means that the original file can be transferred or stored, and recreated, and then used later.

Khush- When a file is compressed, it takes up less disk space than an uncompressed version and be transferred to other systems more quickly. Compression is often used to save disk space and reduce the time needed to transfer files over the internet. There are two main types of data compression; file compression and media compression. File compression is used to compress all types of data into a compressed archive. These archives must be first decompressed with a decompression utility in order to open the original files. Media compression is used to save a compressed image, audio, and video files. This can include formats, for instance, JPEG images, MP3 audio, and MPEG video files.

How does the Binary number system work?

Kaedun- The binary number system is basically 2 numbers as the base and only requiring only two different symbols, for the digits, 0 and 1, instead of many different symbols needed inside the decimal system. The numbers from 0 to 10 are really important in binary 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, and 1010.

Khush- The binary system is used by almost all modern computers. Each binary digit is known as a bit (binary digit). A bit is a single one or zero that make up the 8-bit binary number. Using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) codes, binary numbers can also be translated into text characters for storing information in computing memory. Some examples of binary numbers converted to ASCII text include 110000 = 48, 1111111 = 127. While base 2 binary code is used by computers for text information, other forms of binary math are used for other data types. For instance, base64 is used for transferring and storing media like images or videos.

How are images represented during binary?

Kaedun- Digital images are made up of pixels. Each pixel in an image is made up of its own unique binary code. If the colour black in a pixel was the number 0 and white was number 1, then the binary code for a black and white image would be something like 10101010 or something along the lines of that. Imagine the image what it would look like if it was exactly how I made the line of 1's and 0's the image would be in basically a pattern. If you wanted to do it in bits then 1- bit would give us 2x Colours and 2- Bits would give 4x Colours. To store an image on a computer, the image is broken down into tiny elements of pixels. If you would like to know what a pixel is, it's a short picture element that represents one specific colour.

Khush- Digital images are encoded in binary. To store an image on a computer, the image is broken down into tiny elements called pixels. A pixel (short for picture element) represents one colour. An image with a resolution of 1024 by 798 pixels has 817,152 pixels. In order for the computer to store the image, each pixel is represented by a binary value. We call this representation of colours a "bit-plane". Each bit doubles the number of available colours, ex. 1-bit would give us 2 colours, 2-bites would give us 4 colours, 3-bites would give us 8 colours, etc. In a monochrome (two colours) image, 1 bit is needed to represent each pixel, such as 0 for white and 1 for black. Images are stored in scan lines. Each line is encoded from left to right, top to bottom. In order for a computer to interpret the image, the computer needs to know the colour depth - how many bits represent each pixel, and resolution - width & height (in pixels). We call this extra piece of information "metadata".

How is text represented in binary?

Kaedun- All data inside a computer is sent as a series of electrical signals that are either on (1) or off (0). Therefore, for a computer to be able to process any kind of data, text, images or sound, they must be converted into binary form. If the data is not converted to binary, series of 1s and 0s, the computer won't understand it or be able to process it. When any key on a keyboard is pressed, it needs to be converted into a binary number so that it can be processed by the computer and the typed character can appear on the screen.

Khush- A code where each number represents a character and can be used to transport/convert text into binary. One code we can use for this is called ASCII. The ASCII code controls each character on the keyboard and assigns it a certain binary number. For example:
-the letter a has the binary number 0110 0001
-the letter b has the binary number 0110 0010
-the letter c has the binary number 0110 0011

ASCII code can only store 128 characters, which is enough for most words in English but not enough for other languages. If you want to use accents in other languages or larger alphabets then more characters are needed. Therefore another code, called Unicode, was created. This meant that computers could be used by people using different languages.