It’s hard to believe today, but in the 1940s, the earliest computer technicians actually worked at the bit level. If a computer made a mistake and the technician determined it wasn’t from a burned-out ...

Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. They find that the former Mangarevans combined base-10 ...

When anyone is first introduced to the topic of digital computers, they are almost invariably told that these machines are based on binary (base-2) logic and the binary number system, where “binary” ...

“The present is big with the future,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once said, and he would know. The 17th-century philosopher and mathematician developed the binary number system that is still being used ...

BEIJING —The computer, at its core, is an input-output device: it receives instructions, executes programmes, performs calculations automatically and produces results. By this fundamental definition, ...