Data

A piece of information is anything that gives us knowledge about something: numbers, letters, symbols, images, sounds...

The data have to be stored in the memory of the machine so that it can work with them

The encoding of the data in the machine memory will be based on the type of the data: integer, real, character, etc

Not only data but also instructions are stored

This is to see how the machine internally represents the information

The electronic circuits that make up the machine are only capable of distinguishing between two values ​​(ON / OFF, YES / NO, TRUE / FALSE)

These two values ​​are physically implemented as current step, not current step

To distinguish between a greater number of voltage levels would facilitate the production of errors

Because of this, internal encoding methods must use only two symbols, the binary encoding

The alphanumeric characters (set of alphabetic and numeric characters, although in general, it is assumed that it also includes the rest of the characters available in the system, thus including graphic and control characters) are represented with codes in a type of numerical representation, also called tables of codes or representation tables, ASCII, EBCDIC, etc

Thus, depending on the representation code used, we will say that character A corresponds to a code decimal / binary / octal / hexadecimal