Computers are really just a series of switches.

Ever wonder why the power button on your computer looks like this I/O, or maybe you've seen this on a power switch. Well I'm here to explain the I/O and what this means for computing. All modern technology uses these series of I/O or on/off as a means of telling the program within itself what to do, let me explain.

To get started we must look back, and I mean way back. The binary systems that we use today was started by a philosopher named Gottfried Leibniz in 1679. He discovered a way to express large numbers using only 1 and 0. He went on to use this binary system in mathematics to help prove problems confusing other scholars.

The 1 and 0 are signals for your modern day computer. 1 being true and 0 being false or 1 being on and 0 being off. Whatever the notation it all begins with the programming.

Think of it like this. You walk into a room and flip the light switch, the light comes on opening the electrical current. You flip the switch and the light goes off, thus closing the electrical current. It's the same thing in computers, except in a much, much, much smaller scale. In the second you read this sentence, your computer has completed millions of switch transactions. Commonly Central Process Unit or CPU, show values in something called Gigahertz or GHz. What this means is that every one second a billion cycles have been completed inside the CPU.

In the second the cycles are completed, instructions and data is sent to the different regions of the computer. For instance, you click on that funny cat video, in that second you clicked the video an on signal is sent from your mouse to your CPU which sends an on signal to your internet connection, which sends an on signal through the web to the server. The server replies with and off signal which goes through the connection, through the cpu and completes to your graphics drivers.

Everything that happens into today's computers are a massive amount of 1 and 0's. Next time you think it's uber complicated just remember, only 2 numbers control everything.