Day 7: Lab 1 & 2

LAB 1:

After some very grueling and frustrating conversations discussing other options for using the punch, my group finally came up with an optional theory on how to use a punch to write out letters. Using the same 80-character capability, we converted the decimal to binary code to represent the letters of the alphabet. The numbers punched would be the same, but in order to type in letters, you would use the binary code system.

The binary code consisted of:

1	2	4	8	16	32	64	128
0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7

Each number represented in the binary code would correspond to a number found on the decimal punch card, which then would be turned on and off to represent the corresponding numerical value of the alphabet. For example, the letter “L” is the 12^th letter in the alphabet. To represent this number with the binary code you would turn on the “4” and “8”, to show the letter “L”.

LAB 2:

The code in Lab 2 says, “Be sure to drink your ovaltine.”

Using the base that binary code “65=A”, my group was able to break down the code by strands of 8 and decode the message. Therefore the letter “B” would be binary code “66”, “C=67”, “D=68”, and so on. The 8-bit number “00100000” represents a space in between words. We used a binary code converter to check our answers and discover what the “0010000” 8-bit code represented.

The binary code above is similar to the theory my group thought up from the question above, when using the number of where the letter falls in the alphabet to represent it in binary code form.