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The modern Binary System, or Binary Arithmetic, was fully documented by Gottfried Leibniz in 1647. The Binary System uses a series of 0's and 1's to communicate between machines. Because 0's are the absence of something, they are known as the "no" command, and 1's, being the presence of something (data in computers), are known as the "yes" command. Digital computers simplified everything into binary so they could work more efficiently.

Overview

The Binary System is an enormously important item in the history of computers. Not only computers use it, however. Most electronic appliances communicate by translating commands and information into binary. Due to that fact, it is also commonly called "machine language". The 0's in 1's in the Binary System are known as bits, and the title awarded to every 8 bits is a byte.

While it is true that a few other figures have made significant progress in advancing the Binary System before Gottfried Leibniz, Leibniz was the one who documented of modern binary. Leibniz was born in Germany in early July of 1646. His father died when he was six, and consequently his mother exerted her morals and values upon Leibniz, which led to an increased amount of philosophical thought in his later years. Leibniz was quite ahead of his time in terms of technological thinking. He thought of concepts and designs for hardware and software that were not truly worked out by computer scientists until much later by people such as Charles Babbage.

Binary conversions are simple if you understand the method. To find a numerical value of a number written in binary, you need to assign each bit a power of 2 starting from the right-most bit. The power depends on what order it is from the right-most bit. Note also that the right-most bit begins at 2 to the zero power instead of zero to the first. Then you add together the values. Because it is binary and not a different system, you would only have to multiply the two to the "x" power by 1, which gives you exactly what you had before multiplying it by one, saving you an extra step. For example, we take the random series of binary 101101.

2^5  2^4  2^3  2^2  2^1  2^0
 1    0    1    1    0    1   
32 +  0 +  8 +  4 +  0  + 1 = 45

Therefore, 101101 is 45.

You can also convert binary into other Numeral Systems, such as octal, decimal, and hexadecimal, but that covers a bit more than the history of binary arithmetic.

Significance

The significance of the creation of the modern binary system is that without it, assuming of course that no one else had come across it, there would be no digital electronics. Information would be stored in decimal form 1-10 making it slower to communicate between machines, although there still would be communication as can be seen with pre-1950 computers that used decimal form.