Alphabet Conversion to the Binary System

Now let's look at the send message from our phone. The data did not go across the Wi-Fi networks (Wi-Fi is a network of wireless wave technology providing networking connections and internet. This includes W-Lan - wireless local area networks. Wi-Fi is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance.) as alphabetic letters and symbols. These were recoded as zeros and ones to be later decoded for the receiver.

Consider the name Ada (remember Ada Lovelace?) Let's create the binary byte code for the name Ada using the ASCII table below.

Alphabet Conversions Table

Test Yourself

1) Use the ASCII chart, look up the capital A and locate the decimal equivalent.

2) Using your answer as the decimal, convert the decimal to binary.

Click here to check your answers!

Do this for the other two letters. Did you notice that the other two letters were lower case and use the correct decimal equivalent? To remember the decimal equivalency of the basic letters all you need to remember is that capital A starts at 65 and lower case a at 97. The decimal numbers are in order for each of these starting points for the 26 letters.

The final answer for the binary code to send the name Ada is:

Letter	A	d	a
Hex	65	100	97
Binary (space for readability only)	0100 0001	0110 0100	0110 0001

What goes out across the internet is 010000010110010001100001.
We write it as 01000001 01100100 01100001 for readability.
The ones and zeros are run together with no spaces. Remember, the software programs on the computer will interpret this back to the receiver.

So what of special character letters in other languages, such as an é, used in Spanish and French. In the extended ASCII table these other letters and many more symbols used today are given their decimal equivalents. The é has a decimal equivalent of 130. Here is a quick list of a few other common symbols that we see.

Symbol	Decimal
é	130
ñ	164
®	169
½	171
©	184

Test Yourself

What if this message came to you in binary code? Could you transfer back to read it?

01000011 01010011 01010000 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 00100001

Using the original table given that included the binary conversion for alphabetic letters, this is quick to translate. The spaces are shown for readability.

Click here to check your answer!

The ASCII code system and the software programs that convert data to binary and back to text or other formats needed solved a problem, how to transfer data effectively and quickly across the internet with reliability. The on off switch of bits, zeros and ones, allows everyone to interpret the 0's and 1's as they need in their program. As you can see, extra symbols are easily added without complication, just use the next decimal location and translation is easily accomplished.