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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 12:53 PM EDT |
FOX:
01000110
01001111
00100100
But actually there's a more subtle point here. The CPU registers and main
member represents these bits as "high" and "low" states of a
flip-flop. The hard drive represents them as "transition up" and
"transition down" magnetic states. The main bus represents them as
"high current" and "low current". The internal channels
within the CPU may represent them as "current present" and
"current absent".
And the assignment of 0 to one of these and 1 to the other is *arbitrary* and in
fact *different* in each implementation; high current can mean "1" in
one part of the computer and "0" in another part. (And as noted, in
hard drives, the *change* from high to low magnetic state may signify the bit.)
The software doesn't care. It's designed abstractly. The way bits are
implemented by the electrical engineers is not relevant to it. The electrical
engineers have created a system for doing computations on *abstract strings of
bits*.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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