Sorry, not related to your actual subject at hand, but they *ARE* 1's and 0's 🤣!

http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/Airline_Simulator_2_BE.htm
http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/GeneRally_BE.htm
http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/Microsoft_Windows_BE.htm
http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/NASCAR_Racing_3_BE.htm

<grin> 😀

Are you trying to see the Matrix?

You may try something easier... remember that older computers worked with tapes, so you may get a mp3 of a ZX Spectrum tape and use audacity to see the "shape" of the 0's and 1's in the tape (I think they're recorded using different frequencies).

Because speccies use audio tapes, also you will be able to "hear" the computer language. You may save a block of 0's, a block of 1's and a computer game (0's an 1's mixed altogether) to see how they sound. Loading screens are easy to identify...

That's an interesting idea, thanks!

Question: Is there a way to "visualise" the magnetic orientations on a floppy drive or tape drive? A photo would be fine!

What about flash memory? I have been looking for a picture where you can see all the cells lined up next to each other. I know they are very small, but maybe something under a microscope?

You won't see the 0s and 1s on a floppy since they're encoded, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Frequency_Modulation
but that may be still enough to see some sort of binary data.

The search term "magnetic force microscopy" turns up some interesting stuff that may be relevant.
A different kind of MFM than what wd referred to. 😉

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_force_microscope

😀

Uhm, what would be better than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape ? 😁

Great ideas!

Some of the images I found:

XXL image: http://www.iasforensics.com/HD2_Wiki.jpg

As for floppies, I know 'resqflpy' for DOS can show the contents of each chunk it reads along a disk to the screen so you could probably run it, then point out "THIS IS WHAT IS HAPENING! YOU CANT DO THIS ON NINTENDO" or something

Thanks, I'll check it out!

If you are going after non-technical types, here are a few screen-caps:

😁

dvwjr

well if you ever get around to hex and ASCII this might be useful:

Back on the subject of magnetic media, while it would be difficult to visualize the data on a floppy disk, cassette tape may be a worthwhile avenue to look at.

Here's something you may find useful. It's a page belonging to Mike Brutman (mbbrutman on the VCF), where he's showing and analyzing the waveform from a PC Jr. data cassette as it appears through Audacity. Interesting stuff.

That's really useful guys!

You can make a simple LED circuit and connect it to parallel port:

The 0's and 1's analogy is very easy to understand: if you write a 1 to the I/O address of a parallel pin, you will switch its LED on; if you write a 0 to the same address, you will switch the LED off.

This is a very common exercise in electronics, computing or programming courses. I used to make this kind of stuff in MS-DOS real mode with either C or assembly, but now you may use one of the many GUI apps available:

http://x24.x24garcia.com/prog_LEDtest.html (seems to be a VB6 program)

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/PaPiC.aspx (C++ wrapper for I/O dll)

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/csppleds.aspx (same thing but using C# instead)

http://www.brothersoft.com/parallel-port-libr … net-130837.html (a VB or C# library for .Net)

http://jaspreetscodezone.blogspot.com (a blog with lots of useful info about parallel port programming)

... and many, many more. There are tons of info out there, just google it.

OldThrashbarg pointed it out, but I think it deserves a picture because it was so cool ...

And here is the original page that it came from.

I had a lot of fun poking around with a pretty normal sound editor, zooming in and finding my ones and zeros.

Mike

Argh!

Website here: http://www.brutman.com/Cassette_Waveforms/Cas … _Waveforms.html