Every letter you read. Every frame you watch.
Every note you hear. A single principle underlies all of it.
At the physical layer, information is stored as electrical states. High or low. On or off. One or zero. From this single binary constraint, all digital information emerges.
Drag to explore all 256 byte values
Every character is assigned a unique number — a code point. That number is then encoded as bytes. ASCII was the first map. Unicode became the universal standard.
An image is a two-dimensional grid of pixels. Each pixel stores three values — red, green, blue — each an integer from 0 to 255. A 1920×1080 image contains over 6 million such values.
Sound is continuous pressure variation. To store it digitally, we take snapshots — samples — at regular intervals. The Nyquist theorem states that sampling at twice the maximum frequency perfectly reconstructs the original signal.
Human hearing reaches ~20 kHz. CD quality samples at 44.1 kHz — more than twice the maximum audible frequency.
Video is not stored as a sequence of independent images. Instead, codecs exploit temporal redundancy — only the differences between frames are stored. This is the core insight behind all modern video compression.
Instead of storing a full frame, the encoder stores vectors: "block at (x,y) moved to (x+Δx, y+Δy)"
Compression exploits patterns. If a pattern repeats, store it once and reference it. The more predictable the data, the higher the compression ratio.
Text, image, audio, and video differ only in what they represent and how their data is structured — not in how they are ultimately stored. All collapse to the same substrate.
Representation is abstraction. Every encoding is a mapping from human-meaningful signals to machine-operational integers.