Alignment Matters

Us humans have been counting in the decimal system for a very long time already. It makes sense cause we have ten digits on our hands. To a computer, the decimal system is counter-intuitive. It’s ‘hands’ are basically switches, and a switch can only be either ‘on’ or ‘off’. So it makes more sense for it to count in binary. This has repercussions in the way data is arranged in a computer’s memory.