Computing Basics and Notational Systems

0:00All right, welcome to the Tech Plus course from CompTIA. The exam designation for this is FC0-U71. That might not mean much to you now, but when you take the exam, that's what you're going to be looking for. Okay, so what I want to talk to you about here, first of all, in this first video, is kind of the order of progress that we're going to go through here. I'm following along, generally speaking, with CompTIA's exam objectives as they appear here. You can download this from CompTIA.

0:30It's a PDF file that I think you have to sign in or provide an email or something like that. But it doesn't cost you anything to get this. And then this will show you all the things that they might test you on. Now no test is going to have every single topic. That would be too big of a test, really. It's just the sampling of the things that we see here. But it could be from any of the things we'll see. And I'm going to generally be speaking to you in somewhat the same order that we see things go here. It might be a different order. It doesn't really matter too much.

1:00I just want to let you know kind of the progression that I'm going to be using. I've got these things that say skills 01 and 02 over here to the side. Those are just notes to myself. You don't need to have any regard for those. Yours won't have those if you download this. So you can see here that the first few topics we'll be discussing here will be input processing output and storage, which brings us to my first PowerPoint slide. All right, so first of all, input. Now input is going to be something that really initiates what a computer is supposed to do.

1:33It's going to be required for it to do anything. For example, if I just don't do anything ever and just have my computer turned on, it's just going to be using electricity. It's just sitting there burning gas, doing nothing really until there's some kind of an input. This PowerPoint slide that we're looking at right here, I had to use input. So I used my keyboard to type on my keyboard to type in all of these words, right? So that was input and keyboard is one of those things that we can use. Also we can use a mouse or I use a trackball actually.

2:05We'll talk more about these kinds of things here. Again, a lot of these things will be elaborated upon more more completely as we progress through the course, but there's a mouse as well, which I can use to roll around the desk and to move my pointer in different directions right now, it's really kind of tiny because it's just using a really a stylus. That's another thing that we could do. I have a stylus here, just a little, it's kind of a pen that doesn't actually have ink in it, but I can touch it to a screen and then just start to draw on the screen .

2:35So that's a stylus. This list is not going to be all inclusive. There are going to be other kinds of input devices that we can also show that I just haven't put up here, but these are probably some of the main ones that you'll see. There's also a mic, a microphone. That's what you're listening to right now is I speak into this gigantic microphone. You can't possibly miss it. It's right there. And then there's going to be output for that sound as well, which we'll talk about here coming up. There's also a scanner. So a scanner can take a couple of different kinds of forms.

3:08One of those would be, well, it's not in our picture right here in your field of view, but behind me over here to my left, there is a big printer. And on top of it, it's got a sheet feeder so I can put pages into it and it will run those through a scanner one at a time. It can even double-side it so it can flip the page over, get the front end back of the page or I can use what we call a flatbed scanner where I just lift up a cover, place a sheet on it, and then run the scanner. So that's another thing that could happen. There's another type of a scanner as well.

3:38And that would be something we probably all use most every day. And that's where we go to a restaurant, for example, like a fast food. There's a Taco Bell about a mile from where I live, which is a horrible place for it to be. It's much too close. I go there too often. Anyway, when I'm ready to pay, I just take out, they have these kiosks that you can do self-service with. Just taking my credit card, I put it up next to that credit card reader. You can also call it a reader. And it will read either my chip, my magnetic stripe, or the wireless capability or the contact list, I should say contactless capability of that credit card.

4:17Another kind of a scanner that you can run into as well would be when you go to a store, like a grocery store, and you drag your package of chicken across the glass window that has lasers in it. It reads the barcodes or you could have a handheld scanner where you could point it at something and it reads it. That's another type of a scanner. Those are all going to put input into some kind of a computer that will then have programming that will go to processing. We'll talk about that next.

4:48Also a camera. I'm looking at one right now. That is input of my image of the lighting in here, of the colors in my shirt, all that kind of stuff is going to get input through that camera. And many other types of peripherals. We're not going to exhaust them, but those are some of the main ones you'll see . The kinds of peripherals might be something like, oh, like this. This is something that's called a, actually I'll change the picture here. Let me go to this. A stream deck. Okay. And this is another input device.

5:19Oh, it's dusty. Anyway, I can push one of these buttons and it will do various things for me. Now I'm embarrassed. I really should dust this off. Anyway, I could do a lot of the same things by typing in a command on the keyboard or pressing a certain combination of keys, but it's kind of clumsy and awkward. So I'd rather just push these buttons. So one button I can push this one right here takes this right to this. So I'm in the lower portion of the slides. The other one right here, this one right here, if I press that right now, it takes me back to the full screen, or I could do this one where I'm not in the picture at all.

5:53And some of you might prefer that one. Right now you're saying, thank you, but too bad I'm going to come back anyway. All right. So once we have input, so once we have input that we have put into the computer , the then it has something to do. But what does it do? It has to go to the next stage here, which is processing. So that input has to get handled somehow. And normally I'm going to kind of go out of order here, but normally there's some kind of programming in whatever the input is going into that will then tell it what to do next.

6:26So again, if you're at the store and you're scanning a package of potato chips, that scanner will send it into a point of sale computer of some type or a POS point of sale type of computer. And then it will say, compare that barcode to whatever's in our database of inventory. And then that's how it comes up with the description and the price. Okay, then I'll ask you processed. Normally most of the things will go through what's something called a central processing unit or CPU.

6:57That's the chip that appears on a motherboard that a lot of people equivocate to the brains of a computer. The bottom line of it really is it's really doing math. That's really all it does. But most programming ultimately boils down to some kind of math. Fortunately, it does it for us because I'm terrible at math. So nothing would ever get done if it depended on my math. But the CPU is super smart that way and it's capable of processing. Another thing you might have would be a graphical processing unit.

7:28So a graphical processing unit normally appears on a video card or it could be integrated into a motherboard. But for right now, let's just assume it's in a video card. So the computer that I'm working on, for example, has a video card plugged into it and it's able to process the image that you're seeing of me right now. And when I go on later to export all of this video stuff to a digestible format that can then be uploaded to CBT nuggets so you can watch this video. It's going to handle a lot of that as well.

8:00It's going to have to know how to handle the graphical elements, the color temperature that you're seeing right now, the roundness of this orbit right here. That's all being processed by the graphical processing unit and the stunning beauty that you see here as well. Some of you are saying there must be something wrong with your GPU, James. There's also a bus, not a school bus, not a city bus. This is a bus that we're thinking of with a motherboard. Now I use artificial intelligence to produce video for me or not video, but actually images like the one you see next to me right here.

8:36And oh my gosh, I just noticed something about this. AI doesn't always get it right. First of all, it often doesn't spell things properly. That's supposed to say processing, not processing, but it's really just for kind of creative input or color in the slides, but I noticed one thing just now. Another thing you didn't get right. Look at how many arms this guy has. I don't know what's going on with that, but there you have it. Now I did put input into having to do that. I typed in and had GPT.

9:08I said something like create an image of someone using input processing output in storage. And this is what it gave me. I did not say produce a three armed person, but it did that anyway, just as a free bonus. But anyway, there's some kind of programming there in the input when I typed in the text. There's some kind of programming on some kind of an AI massive computer somewhere that determined the actions. And so it decided to put in various types of colors.

9:38It processed which colors it was going to use it processed. How many arms to give this person? It processed determining some of these various types of devices that it shows out here. Like this looks like a lot like a motherboard, for example. Anyway, it has to do all of that. Now what does actually do when it performs the instructions that are built into the programming of something? Some of those might just be calculations. So my wife and I have a business that we run a couple of different businesses. So I keep track of a spreadsheet to see how expensive everything's getting.

10:12I'll enter in a certain number of dollars and cents and it automatically calculates for me the total at the bottom of that spreadsheet. Boy, sometimes I really hate that spreadsheet. But anyway, it does the calculations for me. It could also be data manipulation. Now that kind of sounds negative. I mean, after all, you don't usually want to hang around manipulative people, but data manipulation can be good. It could process data and manipulate it in such a way that makes it more digest ible.

10:43So that's where I might get a pie chart. Instead of just looking at hard numbers, I might see a pie chart that says, you know, our sales for Q1, quarter one of the year. It's supposed to be a one. And it manipulated that data into a pie chart that made it easier to read something I could put in a presentation present to board members, whatever, whatever else it is. It could also be a matter of decision making. This actually pops up in a couple of different places, but it could be that when I am doing something that it will have to come to a decision here and that decision could go one direction or the other.

11:20So if the answer is to a question that I'm posing, for example, is yes, then it will take certain number of actions over here. If the answer is no, then it might take different actions over here. I'm just kind of saying this in an abstract format right now. I'll show you kind of an example, a simple example of that coming up here in a moment.

0:00And there's also some output that could take place from this. For example, once we have the input, we type something in or whatever, and it gets processed somehow. Usually we want to see the result, or we want to have the result somewhere that is useful. That's what the output is. It's the result of processing the input. So a number of different forms for the output that could take place. So one thing is it could just put it out to the screen. That's very commonly how we'll see the output. So for example, let me go back.

0:31I'm on this slide right now, but in PowerPoint, if I press the space bar, it advances to the next slide. So I'm going to use the keyboard to press the space bar, which then gets processed by PowerPoint, and then advances me to the next slide, and it displays the output here on the screen. There's also sound. So the input your computer is processing right now is streaming video across the internet, and it's receiving that input through an internet connection. And it's producing out sound out of your speakers, your headphones, whatever it is that you're using, or you might be using our closed captioning feature, which would be more of a screen output. Okay. So you're getting all of that. There's also print.

1:15Okay, we even in the digital age, we still need to have print, print out book lets, print out tax returns, print out receipts, whatever. That's all output. And it might just output something too storage. So I might have a dialogue box here. Maybe I'm working on a document, and I give it a file name. And maybe there's a save button here. I won't write the whole word there, but save button right there. And I click that with my mouse, and it saves it to some kind of storage, which I'll talk about here again, coming up in a moment.

1:46The other thing was kind of related to us talking about earlier, where I was talking about decision making in the processing, because there might be further processing that takes place. I'll give you that an example here on the next slide when we talk about that. But what the output might be, it might be something that we call piping, it might pipe a result of something into further programming to produce a result for us. Okay , I'll give you an example again, when I get to it, the next slide. There's also storage.

2:18Okay. So sometimes this is the final resting place of what we're doing here. We might just want to again, save a file, we save it to a hard drive, for example. And we may or may not ever open it again. That might be its final place. But it's the saved output. So we have output. Now we've decided to save it somewhere. That's often where it will go. It might go to a temporary temporary storage location known as RAM, random access memory. This is temporary because a number of two things could happen. Number one, if the power turns off on my computer, whatever's in RAM disappears almost instantly. Or it's also a very, very quickly processing other data, data very frequently. And just a lightning speed will go in and out of RAM.

3:10Your programming usually handles the data that's in RAM. That's usually where processes it. So when we give instructions, for example, through input or the computer to do something like even to write on the screen, like I'm doing right now with this stylus, it could for a brief moment appear in RAM. Or there might be a data set that goes into RAM that programming will need to determine what to do with, make a decision about. It could also be stored permanently. So I could store to a hard disk drive or an HDD.

3:41Now I say permanently, but you know, I could later on delete that file. I could later on modify that file or whatever. Or I could just save it to the hard disk drive and bury it in the ground for 100 years. And that would be permanent at that stage. But the hard disk drive and the solid state drives are considered permanent. Oh, that's supposed to be SSD. Not S D D SSD. See, I make mistakes too. It's not just AI. We'll talk more about the difference between hard disk drives and solid state drives in the future. But for now, just understand that solid state drives are usually more expensive, but also much faster and also much lighter.

4:18Now another place that it could store though, would be the cloud. Now, you've probably heard the cloud by now. It's kind of prevalent in today's technology. And it's a little bit nebulous because it's like, where is the cloud? You know, we just tend to think of clouds overhead, you know, but it's really could be a lot of different places. So for as an example, I use cloud, this PowerPoint presentation you're looking at right now, I save that using a Microsoft product, the cloud product called one drive. It's actually stored in the cloud.

4:51The videos I produce get saved to a different kind of a cloud provider called Dropbox. So what happens is the files are stored locally, but they're also immediately copied up to the cloud. And that's very useful because if this file were to get corrupt here locally, for example, or I accidentally deleted it, I could retrieve it from the cloud. Or I'm doing this on my desktop computer. But if I want to go work from a coffee shop later on, the cloud has a copy of this PowerPoint presentation. And I could just open it from there on my laptop. So a few different kinds of storage. Now, let's take a look at an example of how all this might work out. By the way, if you're looking, don't pay attention to the spelling they AI does as smart as artificial intelligence is, it does not seem to know how to spell. You can see probably several spelling errors here. It's supposed to be say device, that's supposed to say input. So I don't know why it does it this way. But anyway, we're just having it up there kind of for color and for interest, not because we care about the spelling at least not right now. But let's take a look at an example of input processing output and storage. So we might have input where we're entering into a database, a query for a zip code. So let's say that I want to know in my

6:10database, all of the customers that are in zip code, 85035. That's, I think this is an Arizona zip code, 850 is I don't know, 35, it's made it up. It's probably an Arizona somewhere where I live. Anyway, maybe my objective here is when I enter in 85035 from my keyboard, that 's going into a database program. And the database program is going to process my search . And it's going to spit out 85035. I don't know names and addresses, for example.

6:45And here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one. And then now I have a list of those people or customers or whatever that live in 85035. So I might just want to see it on the screen. I want to look at it and say, huh, who lives in 85035? Oh, these five people. That might be the end result. That's all I care about. Or I might have a an advertising campaign that I am spearheading. And I want to pipe all of these results. Okay, to advertising postcards.

7:17It's supposed to be one word, but it's all right. I was spelling like AI right now. Anyway, it could take the result of my output, pipe it or send it to a different program that produces postcards that also gets sent to all of those people. So it pipes it out to, for example, maybe a some kind of a printing program. And likewise, I might want to save all of these results for use later on. Or I might want to save the results because I want to know who has received or who has received a printed postcard that we've sent out. Actually, I don't know if they received it, but I want to know who I've sent postcards to. So so I don't send them the same postcard later on, for example, that would be something that could be saved to a hard disk drive, or could be saved to solid state drive or even a cloud program. But regardless, it's saved in some kind of storage somewhere.

0:00Hey, can I look at your math homework? I didn't understand the assignment. So I 'm gonna have some help to pass this class Do you ever say that in school? Sadly I may have I was never very good at math. So I was really always a struggle for me in fact I I flunked trigonometry in other news and ever actually took trigonometry But anyway the point is I'm not very good at math And I think sometimes there's a perception that in order to be good at computers in order to be good at IT You gotta be some kind of math genius. Well, I've been doing IT for 35 years more than 35 years Never been very good at it, but I can get by just fine Okay, so the reason why I say all that is to tell you this some of this stuff We'll be talking about here if you're not accustomed to the way the numbering works and all that Don't despair and don't get discouraged if you don't pick all of this up right away because it's it's a different way of thinking it's a different way of doing math from for many of us and You will get adjusted to it in accustomed to doing certain parts of this as you go along And I know when I first started looking at some of this it just it seemed like it was you know all of this It's like what the heck is this?

1:15Some of you could probably look at all those you're good at math and you could probably look at that stuff So I know what that is that's some kind of Trigonometry or brainiography or something. I don't know what it is. Anyway, let's take a look here at what I'm sure you are Custom to and that would be decimal numbering. Okay, that's just the same stuff . We always have okay We you know one through ten, you know or zero through nine or you know, we might have certain Numbers like you know one hundreds the hundreds and then the thousands and then the ten thousands and then the I don't know hundreds thousands millions billions trillions squad of trillions whatever all these numbers that were typically used to Dealing with as humans on a decimal numbering level. So that's what we're used to and it's called also base 10 Reason is because it really it has 10 numbers, but zero is a number. Okay. Don 't forget that. You know I might have Zero Oreos left in the cookie jar. That is a number. It's telling me that I have none very very sad day Anyway, that's base 10. I'm not gonna elaborate on that too much more only because you've already been using it your whole life So I'm sure you're already accustomed to it But when it comes to computer data and the way it processes things in the way

2:30it notates the numbers What is your computer actually see well ultimately? The computer only sees binary data So you might see numbers or data and things like that on the computer and it might even be a decimal number You might see I don't know maybe you're in accounting or something and you see the number 10,928 Okay Let's just say that's even dollars. Well, guess what your computer does not actually see that your computer is gonna convert it in It's kind of lowest common denominator in its most digestible form of data It's gonna convert that to you know a bunch of zeros and ones You know, I don't know what the real number would be right now I'm just kind of making that up, but it's gonna look more like a string of zeros and ones and ultimately that's really what your computer sees So even this video of myself talking of me talking that you're really not looking at me You're really looking at a bunch of zeros and ones It's just that your computer Packages it and formats it and runs it through whatever software you're using and through your browser and all of that and it Packages it in such a way that it looks like this Okay, some of you thinking wow couldn't it have looked any better

3:46Even this graphic over here above my head. This is just an AI generated image, but this fan right here That's really a bunch of zeros and ones. It's just that us weak-minded humans We can't interpret a bunch of zeros and ones. We have to have the computer interpret it Packaged it up in such a way that makes some kind of sense to us You ever watch the Matrix? It's a classic film. You got us. You got to see it if you haven't seen it But anyway, there was a scene in there where a young man was able to see you know a bunch of zeros and ones actually It looked a lot like this You know a bunch of zeros and ones going up and down the screen and he could interpret of course This is fiction, but he could interpret that as oh I see a woman in a red dress I see this or I see that now in reality a human product could never do that But your computer does that it's able to see things that we can't and it just produces images like this For us weak-minded humans so really the the kind of the base format that You need to understand initially at the outset here would be something we call binary data Binary as the name implies be I that means to okay Something is bidirectional can go left or right okay binary and

5:04These are the numbers that your computer and really binary data works with there's only two possibilities a Zero or a one let's take a look at a zero first. Okay. It's not an oh, it's a zero and Generally speaking this is going to mean on or false or no or negative something like that So let's look at an example of how this works out You know not long ago I went to a doctor and I had to fill out an intake form online before I went and they ask you things about your medical history You know like you know, I don't know are you overweight or do you smoke or you know?

5:43They all these questions that the doctor can then scold you about so do you smoke and there were two possibilities? Yes, or no, right now these disappeared in plain English and It was easy to just click on no for me because I'm not a smoker But in reality what was going on there is I'm quite sure that This went through Input remember we talked about input previously. I went into input into some kind of Processing right where the processing really converted that to a almost portable one a zero Because a zero is no or negative or false or off. Okay, so when I selected no the reality is It sent to the computer somewhere a zero That's the language that your computer can understand Obviously if I was a smoker and I said yes, then that would have sent a one a one instead Okay, and a one as you can imagine then would be either on or true. Yes positive Those sorts of words in its truest sense of the of the word I guess it would be on or off But we usually use these other values as well and it's pretty well understood that so These are known as zero or one those are only your only two choices

7:02There's no zero one a one and a one and a half or a two or anything like that It's a zero and a one those are known as bits Okay, so the either the zero is a the bit that was turned off or false or something like that or a one is on or true or whatever This is the smallest most reduced form of information that your computer can't understand And if we were to somehow be able to peer into the guts of the computer and see it all We would see again. It would be just all of this ones and zeros just flying by in these Impossible numbers that we would never possibly be able to keep up with you have to be a computer to understand it At least at speed Now there's also groups of binary numbers, okay, so there might be something like this If you look at this this is one two three four five six seven eight eight total bits, okay?

7:56Collectively, this is known as a bite, okay? So if you have eight bits together That's called a bite and we're gonna be looking at that later on when we look at how Data is measured and how various things in computing are measured and you'll you've heard of these before bites, you know Killer bites megabytes gigabytes all that kind of stuff. Okay. Well, we'll review that again here later on

0:00all right I mentioned in our last nugget that ultimately everything boils down to binary it's kind of the lingua franca of Your computer system you might see other things you might see you know even like what we're looking at in the slide colors shapes video all that stuff really a computer just pumping all that out in in binary ultimately and then formatting in a way that We can see it and understand it. So let's revisit math class Maybe you took some information about binary systems in math and we're gonna do that again here I'm pretty bad with math and plus it was decades ago So I didn't really remember really much of anything from any of school anyway So the binary values What does this work out to be all right?

0:45So each bit remember we talked about a bit being a one or a zero one being on or or true or yes Something kind of a value like that positive value and a zero meaning no false negative Something like a negative type of a value Well really we don't count a one or a zero these are not these are not decimal values a one does not mean a value of one literally okay really Binary works on a exponential value scale. Okay, so each bit will have an increasing power of two and We don't read it like we do most other numbers where you know if I had the number 978 we start from the left and we work our way to the right with binary We start with the right and we work our way to the left So the way all that works out is like this. Okay, we have kind of a numbering line Remember in school, you know elementary school or whatever you have a numbering line Right and it would be usually maybe this is a zero and this is one two three four You know there's our numbering line or then we'd go negative negative one

2:00negative two negative three negative four right So that's kind of the number lines that we used to have well in binary We don't go into the negative really but we do start from the right like I mentioned earlier and we move our way to the left So look at this table that I have down here and that should put some enlightenment into this for us So remember we start with the right and if a bit position is on we can have either a zero or a one there Okay, let's just start off assuming that they're all turned on so here in the first bit position It has a value of a decimal one So if I put a binary one in there then that means that this counts as a one Okay, I know that could be a little bit confusing a one as a one right But let's just start with that and then we when we move on we move to an exponential value So whatever was in this position will double as it moves one position over to the left So double a one is a two double a two is a four double a four is an eight double eight is sixteen double Sixteen is thirty two double thirty two is sixty four and double sixty four of course is one twenty eight now I'm making note down here that the bits can continue. These are eight bit positions, right?

3:15That's the eighth bit. It can't go nine ten eleven and so forth further on But the reason why we kind of stopped at the eighth bit position is because Remember computers think in groups of eight bits or a bite So this is kind of how it naturally segments its data. It'll do a bite at a time But if we did go to a ninth bit what would be double one twenty eight B? That would be two fifty six What would double that be it would be five oring at a room here five twelve A double that would be a thousand twenty four and so forth for our purposes right now Let's just park on the eighth bit another reason why that's useful in our current training is because if you move forward further Into yt Especially with the networking you're gonna be working with IP addresses and just as a quick side note IP addresses Are unique to each computer in a network? So my printer over here behind me?

4:09I think it's IP addresses ten dot ten dot ten dot fifteen that what really works out is in Binary that's how it's really gonna be identified I will just identify myself as IP address ten dot ten dot ten dot fifteen Because I'm a weak-minded human and I can't just think in binary terms But your computer will see it this way. Let's just go with one of these numbers Okay, so the decimal ten would be what it would be any combination of these that adds up to ten But they have to be turned on with a one right so since it's ten I already know that sixteen and further to the left these are all non-starters Okay, not even any point in looking at those. I know it has to be values from the right fourth bit here over All right, what two numbers of this will add up to ten? Well, that would be an eight and a two with that equal ten sure would So that means also that I will not count these other ones So anytime in a binary kind of numbering line if you will You want to use one of the numbers there you will assign a one to it in binary and a zero if you want to disregard it Not count it doesn't count whatever. Okay, that means that eight plus two now would equal ten

5:25Right in looking at this in a decimal format. How about a fifteen remember one of my in my IP address? It was ten dot I shouldn't have erased it. I guess ten dot ten dot ten dot fifteen. How would I? Designate the number fifteen in all of this. Well, let's see what numbers would add up 215 again 16 and over too big I already know that's a non-starter, but eight yeah that would fit within 15 So I'd turn that on how about eight plus four. What is that equal twelve? What is? eight plus four plus two equal well that would be fourteen right and then if I turned on the last one that would be 15 So eight plus four plus two plus one equals 15 see that's how binary works out now all have you do probably a couple more of these when we have our Last section within this skill at the end of most skills We usually have some kind of a validation some trainers might call it a challenge or practice or something like that I call mine Validations and I'll have you do a little bit of practice with this to see how you do now and if you want also about octal which you do because that's part of the CompT a tech plus exam objectives then you have to understand this first okay octal really only works with

6:41Binary and we will take a look at that in our next video

0:00All right, so previously we addressed the notational system here of binary values remember on our last video and we work with eight bit positions here starting from the first bit position here ending with the eight bit position over there. Remember that really relates to a bite. Although you can go further to the left and your computer will sometimes do that. That's generally kind of how we group all of this and how your system will will group it. Now, that is a foundation will provide what we need for this next section here which will be notational systems for octal.

0:34Now, in my IT career, I've never really had to mess with octal, but it can be useful, especially for those people that get further into development programming stuff like that. They will use it more often there, but the foundation of it is still binary right. It's just that we're only working with three bits at a time. The whole purpose of it is that kind of makes it a little bit more readable. Because remember, with this, you got a lot of zeros and ones and you know all of this this, and it's just a little bit more to look at in your peripheral vision, I guess, then it would be with octal, which is only with three bits. This is also known as base eight, because it can use a total of eight values, okay, zero through seven. Remember, zero is a number. So it's not one through eight. It's zero through seven.

1:26So it's going to just simplify the grouping of our binary values. Ultimately, the values are still going to be this. Okay, it's just that we're only looking at it three bits at a time instead of eight bits at a time. So with octal, that's what we do. By the way, octal is oct meaning eight oct opus octagon, stuff like that. Okay, octogonally shaped stop signs. Okay, so that's what octal is there. And what with this, what we're going to do is we're going to convert binary to octal here. Okay, so each group of three bits will be one octal value. All right.

2:05So remember, with our binary numbering line in the first bit position, the value is one second bit position. The value is two, because it's doubled, right ? So it doubles that double two is four. And then we stop. We don't go any further with octal notation. So look, this is an example. What if I had a value like this? Okay. And just straight binary without any segmentation or division. All right. Well, in octal , what we're trying to do is we're dividing that in half, right, because that's six bit position.

2:37So we're going to have the first three here, the second three here, that would equivocate to a one one zero and a zero one zero in binary. So if we look at our, our table here, that would be enabling the third bit position on the second bit position, right? So that would be a four plus a two, right, because we're, we got a one there, which means again, we're counting that value. This is one meaning true on, yes, that kind of thing. So we're counting the four, we're counting the two, that adds up to what? Six.

3:09In decimal, the octal notation there would be one, one, zero. All right. So how about this one? A zero, one, zero. There it is right here. Zero, one, zero. That means we're only counting the two for this position. So that would be a decimal value of two. And our octal notation, there would be zero, one, zero. All right, I'll put a line here to kind of designate that. This is decimal. This is octal. And in this field, I don't probably don't really need to put decimal. I'm just putting that in to make a little bit more understandable that this value equals six, this value equals two when we look at decimal values.

3:47Now, I have to say for all of this, when you take the exam for the tech plus, I doubt if they're going to ask you to convert all these values back and forth and to be the math expert with any of this. Some of you are already good at this, and so it wouldn't be a problem. For me, it wouldn't be a problem either, but I'd have to stop and think about it for a minute, but I don't think you're going to have to for that exam. Nevertheless, it's part of the course. So I want you to understand, have an understanding of the differences here between decimal and base aid and base two , which is straight binary and all that kind of stuff.

4:23Now, I do also have to make an emphasis here. Remember how we were looking at this. It's a six and a two. That's a six and that's a two. That does not equal sixty two. All right. What that equals really is if we convert this into straight binary for decimal, then that's going to give us something different. So that would be a two plus a sixteen. That's sixteen plus a thirty two. Plus sixteen plus thirty two. That would equal fifty if my math is right.

4:57Thirty two plus sixteen would be forty eight plus two. So that'd be equal fifty . So I just want to be clear on that, okay, because we're working with octal notation with just breaks up the binary value here for us. So that makes it a little bit more readable. You'll have to look at three bit positions at a time. And if we look at those separately, yes, that's a six and yes, that's a two. But really what that's referring to is this whole binary value, which equals fifty. Now, again, I'm not going to expect you to get tripped up on that on the exam because they're not going to do that to you. Only I would be mean enough to do that to you.

0:00All right, and then now let's move on into hex values. Okay. So with this, let's start really with the decimal value. I've just got a table I just produced here. And let's just look at this first. This is nothing unusual that you've been using this your whole life. Okay. So zero through 15 for a total of 16 different values, right? Same kind of numbering that us humans are used to dealing with. Now let's ignore the middle column for a moment and go over here to the binary values.

0:33This is stuff we've already looked at, right? So if we have a binary value of all zeros, that's the same as zero and decimal, right? Because we're not counting any of the values on this whole numbering line. If these are all zeros all the way through, that's just a zero, pretty straight . Let's skip down a few. Let's go down here to seven. Okay. That's a zero, a one, one and a one, right? If we look at our binary numbering line, we have a zero here and a one and a one and a one, that means we're counting the four.

1:04Okay. And we're adding to that six plus a one, that's seven. There you go. Seven. Now initially here, as we go down through all of this, not really a lot of surprises, even if we got down to, let's say, the nine right here. Okay. Uh, then over here we would have, well, this, this right most position beat, we 'll turn that on. That's a one, eight right here. So that would be eight plus one equals nine, right? So in binary, that's what nine looks like.

1:37Decimal. That's what nine looks like. Now let's switch it up here and start to count the middle column. How about this? No surprises, right? It's really the same. All of these decimal values and the hex values are the same. Oops. All doesn't have three lines in it. Anyway, see how good I am at math. Anyway, these are all the same. All right. Very, very easy from that perspective. Now it does get trickier when we get into anything past the nine.

2:10Now why would we do that, by the way? Uh, first of all, really the value, hex values, they're the reason why we use these is for compactness. I'll just put compact. Okay. So we have compact and this gets to be a factor when we work with certain kinds of values. We want to squish down the distance from left to right here to make it more compact and readable. So if we look at the decimal value of 10, how many, you know, spaces that require, it requires two, right?

2:47A one and the zero that equals 10. There's two spaces involved there. And the binary values is a lot less efficient because to 10 there, that's the eight position. That's the two position that would equal 10 in decimal, but it requires a total of four spaces to write that out, correct? However, look at the hex value for it for 10. It's just an a very compact. We only need one space for that. Similarly, with all the rest of these all the way down through till we get to the 15, 15 is a F in hex value.

3:25We would need four spaces of there in binary and two spaces here. It seems to write right now, two spaces here in decimal, but much more compact if you just have an F right there. So it goes a through F a equaling at 10, b equaling 11, c equaling 12, d equ aling 13, e is 14 and F is 15. There is no g and Q and X or anything like that. Hex only goes zero through nine and a through F.

0:00All right, so now that we have some concept of notational systems, particularly in relation to binary, we can use that knowledge to expand it into other areas. And these are primarily going to be areas of units of storage, like how big a hard drive is or how much memory a computer might have, how much RAM, or you could use it in terms of data throughput, like how fast is your land speed, your local area network, or how fast is your Wi-Fi, how fast is your internet connection, that sort of thing.

0:30Now, you might be looking at this and saying, "Hmm, some of it looks kind of familiar, but not really completely." So, for example, you may have purchased a computer that had, I don't know, 500 gigabytes of storage on it. So that looks kind of like this, but not quite. That was gigabytes, gigabytes instead of gig bit bytes. Well, I'm going to get tongue twisted, I promise you, before I'm done with all of this. Generally speaking, these are the more literal terms, okay?

1:02If we wanted to be completely specific or completely accurate, I guess, with the way we should say them. But partially because of various vendors for storage, the way they have provided terms for their storage and so forth, we generally use other terms that actually roll off the tongue a little bit easier, and which you're probably heard more frequently, like instead of gigabytes, you might have heard of kilobytes. Instead of megabytes, you might have heard of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes and so forth, instead of the way that we see them written here.

1:38I'm just providing these because these are kind of the most literal form of those. Now, also, what is it? I'm going to use the literal terms here first. What does it bite? How do we know that? Well, it really starts again from our binary numbering system. Remember, we start with the right and we double it every time we go further to the left. So there's one, two. How did I write a two like that? Oh my goodness. Not only did I flunk math in school, I also flunk penmanship. So there's a one and then a two and then a four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128, five, 12 and what's double five, 12, a thousand, 24.

2:24Yes, right there. So you can see there that normally we were stopping right here when we had eight bits. And again, that's where you're going to stop generally when you do things like, oh, IP addresses and stuff like that, which ultimately is really binary. But now we've expanded and we've moved further along that kind of numbering line in binary till we move further to the left till we got to a thousand, 24. So that starts with a K and you see that in other things as well.

2:55Kilo, like if something weighs a kilo, then that's where you see that K I right there. Okay. But anyway, all of these are exponential. That's why I have factor over here. You don't need to memorize all of that. I'm just putting that up there for you for you math nerds. Also each one of these as you move further down, you start at kibba bites and you move down to meba bites. It's a thousand times more. So a meba bite is a thousand kibba bites. A thousand meba bites are meba bits.

3:26A thousand meba bits would be a gibbib it. I'm really having a hard time pronouncing all these some right now. Okay. Gibbib bits would be a tebibib it. Oh my gosh. And so forth. I'm just going to assume that you can assume that all of these are a thousand times whatever preceded it. And if you want to know the literal value, it's it's all over here. Now I'm you're not going to memorize all of this. Okay. Don't don't bother trying to memorize all of this. I never have. We just start at the smaller measure and we assume that you know it's a thousand more than what preceded it.

4:01So there are symbols you might see. These are the abbreviations for the symbols over here on the right. But again, I want to emphasize we usually use the more colloquial, easier to pronounce terms, kill a bit mega bit, gigabit, terabit, so forth. Also these are in terms of only specific bits, as I was mentioning earlier, but remember, only a computer thinks in terms of chunks of eight bits at a time.

4:32Did I write it there? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Yeah, there's eight there. So that would be a bite, remember? Well a thousand bytes would be guess what? A kibbit bite. Okay. All right. So just bear that in mind. Anytime you see bite at the suffix, then it's working in terms of chunks of these eight bytes there. And also I may bring this up again when we talk about specific storage, like hard disk drives, network attached storage, RAM, stuff like that.

5:05The vendors for storage products have generally kind of cheated. Okay. Because it's easier for them to attain higher numbers. If they make it multiples of a thousand instead of starting at a thousand twenty four, they started at a thousand. Okay. So then if you had a thousand kilobytes for storage, now you would have a meg abyte. But in the storage that they're using here, it's not this much storage.

5:38It is actually only one million. Okay. And using that, especially as it scales up to larger and larger units of storage, then they can kind of cheat that. It's kind of was useful for marketing. The earlier on when a hundred megabytes was a lot of storage or 500 megabytes was a lot of storage. Nowadays, it's really small to have 500 megabytes. But they still kept that same kind of convention as they moved down through here.

6:10Just as an FYI again, you don't need to memorize that. I'm just letting you know that for most storage when you hear that it's a, oh, I don't know, gigabytes, some number of gigabytes, for example, it's not going to this number . It's going to, what is that? A billion bytes. So it'd be one like that. It'd be a billion bytes instead of what it would literally be like this. All right. Now, do you run into that every day? No, colloquially speaking, and just in general IT conversation, we say that we have a 500 gigabyte hard drive or we have 300 megabits per second throughput speed.

6:50Let me give you an example of that too, by the way. So if I just bring open a browser over here and I just go to fast.com, this is actually from Netflix and it's a way to measure your internet speed. Actually, I think you can see it even see where it says Netflix down by my microphone. So Netflix came up with this just as a way to quick and dirty way to check your internet speed. Notice that it has 300 megabits per second. Now there's an important distinction there.

7:23When it comes to storage, I'll write this up here at the top. Let's say I have 300 megabytes of storage left on my hard drive. So that would be for storage. Or maybe I have 300 a program that's using 300 megabytes of RAM. It's a case for storage for RAM, like hard drive for RAM, something like that. Did you notice that this website here that I just showed you had a lowercase B right there?

7:56That's an important distinction because when I have 300 megabits of throughput, it's the lowercase B, okay, megabits. All right, it would be incorrect to say I had 300 megabytes of data throughput. That would basically be eight times this. And it would be this right here, all right? Because we're working with bits, not bytes when we're talking about data throughput. And as you look at the outline for the exam objectives that we have from CompT IA here for TechPlus, you see that again here, it kind of tells it for us.

8:35Storage units are in bit byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte . And then the chart I gave you goes further beyond that into really truly large, large storage. So you can get into exabytes, exibits or exabytes, zeta bytes or zeta bytes, y ada bytes or yaba bytes. Gosh, that's hard to pronounce. Anyway, then you're getting into just staggering amounts of storage there. Anyway, once again, if it ends in a byte, that's usually going to be referencing storage.

9:09If it's throughput, like an internet connection, the speed of a network or something like this, then you're almost always going to be looking at bits, okay? Killer bits. I don't know why my pen's doing that. Killer bits per second, megabytes per second, gigabytes per second. And again, the second B there is lowercase as opposed to an uppercase for storage. We're going to be talking about processor speeds more when I talk about processors at a future point in time.