There are a number of very common needs for a computer, including the need to store and view .
Computers use electrical signals that are on or off, so they have to see everything as a series of numbers. This data is represented as a sequence of 1s and 0s (on and off). All data that we want a computer to process needs to be converted into this binary format.
Binary is a number system that only uses two digits: 1 and 0. All information that is processed by a computer is in the form of a sequence of 1s and 0s. Therefore, all data that we want a computer to process needs to be converted into binary.
The binary system is known as a ‘base 2’ system. This is because: