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 computer can store all types of numbers ranging from negative to positive numbers and fractional to whole numbers. However, it can also store non-numeric data that can take on a number of discrete values, like the four seasons of a year. If you can assign a number to each possible distinct value, you can represent non-numeric data, such as text characters, on a computer. ASCII and Unicode are universal codes that encode a particular character into a binary number. 

First came ASCII, which was initially a seven-bit encoding system as shown in Figure 2. Although seven bits were enough to cover all the characters in the English language and punctuation marks, they were not enough to encode other characters. Therefore, in 1988, the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduced the eight-bit ASCII encoding system.

In this lesson you will learn about number and letter representation via ASCII and Unicode encoding.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Number and Letter Representation

Character representation in binary