Storage of Programs and Data

While typing at your keyboard, what do you think happens when you press the keys? Does a letter A go somewhere inside the computer's memory when you press the A key? It must, or else the computer could never remember your program's contents. The computer does store the A, but not in the format you might expect. The computer stores only a representation of the letter A. For all intents, the A is in memory, but it does not look like you think it should.

Remember that your computer is nothing more than thousands of switches turning electricity on and off. Each character in your computer is represented by a combination of on and off switches. Programmers generally refer to an on switch as a 1 (one) and an off switch as ...

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