Everything a computer touches is bits — on or off, 1 or 0. Watch text, color and numbers fall out of raw binary, then flip the bits yourself.
A bit is one binary digit. Eight bits make a byte (4 bits = a nibble, 16/32/64 bits = a word). Each position is worth a power of two. Click any bit to toggle it and watch every interpretation update live.
Same base math powers the base converter.
Logic gates combine bits position by position. Click the bits in A and B to edit them, then pick an operation. NOT only uses A.
Each character maps to a number via ASCII / UTF-8. A = 65 = 01000001. UTF-8 extends this to every language using 1–4 bytes. Type a character:
A pixel is three bytes — R, G, B — each 0–255. Mixed, they make any of 16.7M colors. Drag to mix one pixel:
Audio is a wave measured thousands of times a second. Sample depth = how many bits per measurement: 8-bit = 256 loudness steps (gritty), 16-bit = 65,536 steps (CD quality), 24-bit = studio. More bits = finer the staircase that approximates the smooth wave.
Plain unsigned bytes count 0–255. Signed bytes use two's-complement so the top bit means negative (−128…127). Floating point splits bits into sign, exponent and mantissa.
One byte can pack 8 yes/no switches. Unix file permissions do exactly this — click a permission to toggle its bit and watch the octal value (like chmod 755) change.
chmod value: 000
When a value spans several bytes, which byte comes first? Big-endian stores the most-significant byte first (like we write numbers); little-endian (x86) stores the least-significant first. The number 0x12345678 in memory:
Big-endian: 12 34 56 78
Little-endian: 78 56 34 12
Mixing them up is a classic bug when parsing network packets or binary files. See raw bytes in the crypto tools.