Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

A file is a collection of related information that is recorded on secondary storage devices like magnetic disks, hard disks, and tapes. It acts as a medium for giving input and receiving output from a program. There are multiple file formats that you must have used on your computer, ranging from text files to video files. Some of the most common file formats are shown in Figure 1.

In secondary storage, files are stored as streams of zeros and ones. We use ASCII and Unicode to convert binary data to human-readable format to process textual information from a file as shown in Figure 2. But to do that, our computer needs to know about the format of the file. Only then can it accurately convert the data. Otherwise, it might show garbled values in an attempt to infer the encoding standard for a particular file.  

In this lesson you will learn about file representation in Python.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

File Representation

What is a file?