The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

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 ...

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” ...

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 ...

Editor's Note: This article was provided by Inside Science. The original is here. (ISNS) -- In 1703, the German scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the binary numbering system that is the ...