The 1s and 0s that a computer works with are referred to as?

Answer 1

Computers don't actually work with 1s and 0s; they are simply human-readable notations for the binary representations that a computer actually works with. We refer to them as binary digits or simply bits.

Inside a computer, bits are represented in a variety of ways, including high or low voltage within a capacitor, positively or negatively charged particles upon a magnetic disk or tape, long and short scores burned into an optical disk. Anything that can switch between two possible states and maintain that state (temporarily or permanently) can be used to encode binary information. We use 1s and 0s because it is the most convenient notation for binary arithmetic and logic operations, precisely mimicking the operations within the machine. We also use other notations that are more concise, including hexadecimal notation (where each hex digit represents 4 binary digits) and octal (where each octal digit represents 3 binary digits). The computer doesn't understand these notations any more than it knows the difference between a 1 and 0, but we can program it to convert all of these human notations into binary data (machine code) that it can understand. We can also program it to convert decimal notation to binary, which is convenient when we're working with real numbers such as currency, length, temperature, speed, etc.