CS50 Notes — How do computers communicate actually?

Jack Liu
2 min readJun 13, 2021

This is the lecture zero of computer science 50 also known as CS50 hosted by Harvard University.

In my opinion I think the name of this course is very interesting because it different from other online classes.

CS50 starts with lecture zero just similar to programming that including zero as always.

In the first week we have learned about binary which is the system of zero one. And all of the computers just communicate with each other through zero and one. That's just the shocking fact. All the colors or images even videos are fundamentally zeros and ones !!

Blow my mind !!

Take colors for example: we often using RGB which is the way to represent what color is through bits . And we got 16 bits, 24 bits or 32bits.

Most commonly is 24 bits.

Each color base is contained with 8 bits which gives you 256 possibilities.And we got three color bases so that 8 x 4 = 24 bits

As well as images, using bits to communicate and represent itself. Images all comes down to pixels and all pixels is combined with pretty much millions of colors. And for each color, it consist of 24 bits.

Like a pyramid which was builded by millions and millions of saints.

so as images which was builded by millions of bits.

Last but not least, bit comes from 0 or 1 just like light bulbs.

It only gives you two possibilities , on and off .

Like zero or one.

It indeed reminds me of the old saying:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

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Jack Liu

是一名意外喜歡健身的工程師男子,平時下班時不是在健身,就是在前往健身的路上。 如果文章有一點點幫助的話,就幫我鼓掌一下吧,寫作看到有反饋的話會很開心的~~ Btw 鼓掌好像可以按很多次,挺有趣的。