While this question might sound a bit like a self-help guide for computers, it actually says something about how they work.

A computer can deal with almost any number*, but you may have noticed that certain numbers often appear when you're buying a device such as a phone or a laptop.

Mathematically inclined readers will immediately recognise that 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 are powers of two.

One example is the earliest microcomputers in the late 1970s that used 8-bit chips. Since then, they've advanced through 16 and 32 bits, to the modern 64-bit processors.

The idea that electronic computers should use the binary system began with Claude Shannon in 1937, and today, his MIT master's thesis is recognised as one of the most influential papers of all time.

While the implementation is, of cour

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