You look at the sky and see that it is blue. This information comes to you on the sky – it blue. Listening to loud music, you get information about music – it is loud. We can say that information – a description of the world around us. You, as any person who receives information through the eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on. For example, information about the taste of food you take with your tongue. The resulting information can be stored, for example, do you remember that lemon tart.

To keep the information a person uses images and words. For example, you remember the word for "sun" and can imagine his image – a bright and warm yellow ball. Something like this work with the information everyone. The computer must process the same information, but it has no ears and eyes, and can not work with images. The only thing that can computer – is considered, but said the computer very quickly and without errors. If we can translate information in a form that a computer understands, ie, in the form of numbers, it will help us to deal with a lot of information. Translation of any information in numerical form is encoded, and information presented in the form of numbers said encoded information.

You know that we will use all ten digits, zero through nine. And how many digits the computer knows? It turns out that the computer knows only two digits – zero and one. With these means of these two numbers can be represented by a variety of information – text, numbers, pictures, sounds and so on.