Computers may seem really smart, but they only work with 1s and 0s. Really. All that high-speed calculation and rapid information processing comes down to the manipulation of two numbers.

Each piece of computer memory is called a bit and it can either be on or off, 1 or 0. The system we use to work with these bits is called binary, or base-2. Computers organize bits (binary digits) in groups of eight called bytes. A byte is enough space to fit a single letter, by the way.

(Fun fact: half a byte—4 bits—is called a nibble. Cute, right?)

Computers don't get decimal numbers (the ones you see every day in Math class); all they have to help them are these bits that can either be 0 or 1, which means that something has to translate between decimal and binary. Instead of writing out three like…3, the computer understands it as 00000011.

Huh?

Just like how each place in decimal notation matches a number times ten to the power of that place (30 is the same as saying 3 × 10¹), each bit in binary matches a power of 2, starting from the rightmost bit at 2⁰. Going from three, you'd get something like this.

3 = (1 × 2¹) + (1 × 2⁰)

It's all because the digital computer's hardware can only handle 0s and 1s. Why? A computer’s CPU (Central Processing Unit, the thing that makes it work) holds a swarm of transistors, loyally switching on and off according to electrical pulses. Whether that transistor's on or off translates into the 1 and 0 of binary.

As if that wasn't enough, these states also match the true and false of Boolean logic. Boolean logic works through a series of gates that allow you to have different outcomes and decisions based on sets of input or combinations of these true/false values. Binary and logic make the computer able to do all kinds of higher functions like stream The Dark Knight and insult you in Shakespearean English.

Ahhh…that one never gets old.

(Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5)