Why Do Computers Use Binary? #gcsecomputerscience

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Why do computers use binary? Let's have a look. Our computer is made from electronic circuits and electronic circuitry uses switches. A switch has two states, off and on. So, we can go off, on, off, on, and so on. And that's it.

[00:00:17]That's all we can do. So, we can represent off with a zero and on with a one.

[00:00:23]So, computers only need two states.

[00:00:26]Binary matches this perfectly cuz binary just has two values, one and zero. So, we can use one to represent on and zero to represent off.

[00:00:35]So, computers use binary because electronic circuits only have two states, on and off. And that's basically [clears throat] it. So, thank you very much for watching. Uh if you want to have a look at some more questions, head over to csrevision.co.uk.

[00:00:48]Thank you very much and good luck.