The lecture showed the history of the computer binary system we use today, covering binary, ASCII, Unicode and Metadata. The excercise in the class took this information on to the practicalities of how these formats are seen by the end user, using different Microsoft programs.
Data formats as an end user.
The binary format was generated to allow for a switch to be in either in the (0) off position or the on position (1).
ASCII - this is seven bit, allowing for 128 different Latin characters to be stored in binary. This format was produced prior to 8-bit computers. A version of this is used by Microsoft Notebook.
Unicode - a more modern version which allows for 107,000 international characters.
The tag below shows the work undertaken in the class exercise. It was built in word but saved as a single web page. I hope that it shows that though embedded within the html format programming an original text message and location of an imported file can still be seen.
http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abhj012/weather-bells-whistles-now.mht
Definitions gained during the lecture
Metadata - this is the information that the computer needs to process the data it is given. The tags control how the data is split under different headings, ie
Data - this usually refers to unprocessed text
Information - this is processed text
File - this is usually a single piece of information
Document - this can contain more than one file, often of different file types.
Extra information found out re Blog posting building.
To copy and paste within the posting, as well as using the Edit menu of the web browser you can use the keyboard ctrl commands.
Conclusion
The conclusion is that, the computer is only a none thinking group of parts, which is able to process text into information only when they are told how by man ..... no artificial intellegence (yet).
