How computers are able to take the words entered on a keyboard and translate them into digital information?

Answer 1

In short form, by means of a program, or part of a program, the way everything else happens in a computer.

Programmers and other engineers write code that looks at the keyboard for inputs from the operator. Various parts of various programs interpret the keyboard commands different ways, since you the operator may be hitting a key for different things, to exit the program, to start printing, to save the file, etc.

For your question, you have to assume that a text program like MS Word is operating. Word is waiting for you to enter information from the keyboard (it's in insert mode). As each key is hit, Word calculated what the key means and decides what key you hit, for example the "W" key.

Word looks up the letter in a table and finds the ASCII equivalent decimal number to the letter and stores this number in a memory buffer. As you hit the "o" "r" "d" keys MS Word looks each letter up and stores the decimal number in the buffer.

Now there are 4 numbers stored in sequential locations in a buffer.

Now let's suppose that you tell Word to save and exit.

The computer program will take all of the text that it has in various memory locations and writes it to disk, so at a later time you can load that digital info back into Word, display it on the screen and allow you to type in more words.

That was the somewhat less simple explanation. Can't get more complicated without writing a few textbooks.

Answer

Each key on the keyboard is assigned a number. Hold down your alt key while typing in a number from 1-255 in notepad.

that not tranlate to digital information

First it needs an encoder that converts information from what we call decimal form to binary, and then in order for the information to appear on the screen, you need a decoder that takes binary and converts it back to decimal.

Answer 2

Each key is assigned a value. An electronic signal representing that value is sent from the keyboard to the computer where it is placed in a buffer and waits to be used by the computer's I/O subsystem.

Answer 3

The computer is connected to the keyboard via cables that power the electronics on the keyboard. When each key is pressed, this electronics sends a series of digital signals to the computer (usually through the wires, but the operation is similar on wireless keyboards). Each sequence of digital signals is unique to the key that is pressed, and is again unique for the key combinations that are pressed (for example, when one presses Shift+A together). The circuitry inside the computer, in combination with the operating system, interprets these signals and stores them on the hard disk as individual "characters". These signals are encoded in a common language so that they can talk with each other. The most popular encoding in North America is 'ASCII'. In other regions, it is different. You can checkup "ISO" language codes for how Linux/Unix systems store these characters; on Windows based operating systems these characters are encoded using "unicode".

Answer 4

By converting them to binary (ie 0 and 1). Every letter/number that you type is represented in binary code. for example 1 is 0001 in binary, 2 is 0010 in binary etc