How Hexadecimal Works in 9 Minutes?

Hexadecimal is like having 16 different colored blocks to build bigger numbers instead of just 10.

Imagine you're playing with building blocks, there are only 10 colors, from red (which stands for 0) all the way up to purple (which stands for 9). That’s how we count in base 10, like on your fingers. But what if you had 16 colors? Then you could use numbers from 0 to 15, and that's hexadecimal, or base 16.

In the world of computers, they often use groups of 4 bits (tiny switches that can be on or off) to make bigger numbers. Since 4 bits can show 16 different values (from 0 to 15), it’s much easier for them to work with 16 colors, like in hexadecimal.

Instead of counting like this:

0, 1, 2, ..., 9, 10, 11, ...

Hexadecimal counts like this:

0, 1, ..., 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, where A is 10, B is 11, and so on up to F, which is 15.

So instead of writing a big number as 255, it can be written in hexadecimal as FF, that’s much shorter!