An interactive guide to Memory, Binary, and the Internet for Jennifer & Chhota Badmash
This is your hard drive. It holds everything permanently (games, photos) even when the computer is off. It holds a lot, but taking things out takes a little time.
This is where you put what you are working on right now. It's super fast! But, when you turn the computer off (clear the desk), everything here is wiped clean.
Computers run on electricity. They don't understand words; they only understand two things: Electricity ON or Electricity OFF. We call this a Bit.
State: 0 (OFF)
One bit is too small to do much. So, computers group them in eights. 8 Bits = 1 Byte.
Computers love the number 2. They group things in powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16...). Early computer scientists realized that 8 bits gave them exactly 256 different combinations. That was the perfect amount to assign a unique code to every capital letter, lowercase letter, number, and punctuation mark on a keyboard!
Click the bits below to make a Byte! See what number and letter it creates.
The internet is millions of computers connected by giant cables. But how do they find each other?
Just like your house has a street address, every computer has an IP Address. It's made of exactly 4 Bytes (4 numbers from 0-255). Example: 142.250.190.46
We type "google.com" because humans are good at remembering names. But computers only speak numbers! So, the internet uses a giant phonebook called DNS (Domain Name System). When you type a name, DNS translates it into the 4-number IP address so the computer can find the website.
Websites are just files (bytes) sent from their IP address, through the cables, into your computer's Memory, where your screen turns them into colors and text!
| Size | What it holds | Example Data | What it looks like in Memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Bit | A simple Yes/No | Is the light on? | 1 |
| 1 Byte (8 Bits) | Small numbers (0-255) | The number 9 | 00001001 |
| 1 Byte (8 Bits) | A single character | The letter 'A' | 01000001 |
| 3 Bytes (24 Bits) | A single pixel color (RGB) | Pure Red | 11111111 00000000 00000000 |
| 4 Bytes (32 Bits) | An IP Address | 192.168.1.5 | 11000000 10101000 00000001 00000101 |
| 4+ Bytes | Fractions / Decimals | 3.14 (Pi) | Requires "Floating Point" math across multiple bytes. One part stores the number, another stores where the decimal point goes! |