Computer Data Representation

Data Representation

All data are representing by code. In older days, the code used is Morse code, smoke signal and semaphore. Nowadays, computer also used its own code.

For your information, our computer only recognizes two types of digits, which is 1 and 0. They are also called a bit as each 1 or 0 is one bit in the binary system. 1 and 0 also represent on and off state and yes or no.

Bit is the smallest unit in a computer binary system which can be understood by computer. One bit can also be combined to form a much more complex number. Next to the bit, it is a byte. One byte is a combination of 8 bit. Example of a byte is 10110110. There is a total of 256 combination of this number. All the character you read here is a byte.

There are three character codes to represent characters which are ASCII, EBCDIC and Unicode. Each byte contains eight bits. A byte provides enough different combination of 0s and 1s to represent 256 characters.

The combinations of 0s and 1s are defined by patterns. These patterns are called coding scheme. The 256-character capability of ASCII and EBCDIC is too small to handle the characters that are used by other languages such as Arabic, Japanese and Chinese.

The Unicode coding scheme is designed to solve this problem. It uses two bytes (16 bits) to represent one character. Unicode will have more than 65,000 different characters. This can cover all the world’s languages.

On top of that, you must also know that 1kb is 210 bytes, 1 Megabytes is 220 bytes and 1 Gigabytes is 230 bytes.

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