Why should I be able to understand binary numbers?
All of the complicated things that we can do with a computer, such as drawing and manipulating graphic images, playing games, working with word processing documents, or chatting on the Internet, are based on millions of tiny switches in the computer. These switches can be either on or off, represented by a 1 or 0. At its heart, a computer only "understands" numbers - specifically, 0s and 1s. Another instance of where an understanding of binary numbers is important is in Internet Protocol (IP) addressing.
A binary adding machine
In order to understand the binary or base 2 number system, we have to recall how numbers are represented in our standard base 10 number system.
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