In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the introduction of the electronic digital computer was greeted with great excitement. Able to perform the work of seven thousand engineers in mere seconds, these first generation computers were remarkable machines, yet the process of programming them was a difficult one. The very early computers used vacuum tube circuitry and the familiar decimal digits (0-9) to represent data. Computer engineers found it was very difficult to get the precise power voltages needed to represent ten different digits, and data was frequently misrepresented. In 1946 John von Neumann, a Hungarian mathematician working on the EDVAC project, decided to abandon the decimal system in favor of the binary numbering system, which has been utilized every since.

Although computers seem to perform amazing feats and accomplishments, they actually understand only two things--whether an electrical "on" or "off" condition exists in their circuits. The...