Day 7 Labs

Lab 1: We looked at new ways to store information on a punch card, rather than the system that is already being used. The new way looks at each column as a separate character and uses a letter's binary code to determine what letter gets punched. For example, to make an A you would punch the number 9 because A's binary code is 00000001. A is the first letter in the alphabet, and therefore it is assigned number 1. Each letter in the alphabet has a number according to when it comes in the alphabet. You find what this number is, then figure out how you would make it in binary, then punch the appropriate numbers in each column. When starting the word Lorem, you would punch 6 and 7 in the first column to make the letter L, since in binary 12 is 00001100. This may seem confusing to decribe in words, but this way of storing data is a good alternative to the one already established.

Lab 2: This string translated to "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine". I admit I put the string into a conversion calculator, but what the computer is doing to decode it is somewhat simple to do. Each letter or symbold is a different binary code. So, each 8 numbers in the string represents a letter of text. Each capital, lowercase, and symbol has a different binary code. For example, the first 8 numbers of the string are 01000010, which makes a capitol B in ASCII code. Using a conversion chart, you can decyfer each byte and find its meaning in text. The link to the converter I used is : http://www.livephysics.com/ptools/binary-text.php