This is part of my new series on what the 0’s and 1’s in computers mean, how computers use them to store various kinds of information, and why all of this works the way it does. When I was a boy, my schoolmates, knowing that I was interested in computers, would sometimes ask me if I could read binary. They imagined I would see some binary, and be able to read it out loud like they could read letters, perhaps some binary that looked like this:
