Binary data is counting a number of successes in one trial. An older term is quantal data.
Binary data occurs in many different technical together with scientific fields, where it can be called by different tag including binary variable in statistics.
In advanced don't cares non all binary data is numeric. Some binary data corresponds to computer instructions, such(a) as a data within processor registers decoded by the control unit along the fetch-decode-execute cycle. Computers rarely modify individual bits for performance reasons. Instead, data is aligned in groups of a fixed number of bits, commonly 1 byte 8 bits. Hence, "binary data" in computers are actually sequences of bytes. On a higher level, data is accessed in groups of 1 word 4 bytes for 32-bit systems and 2 words for 64-bit systems.
In applied computer science and in the information technology field, the term binary data is often specifically opposed to text-based data, referring to any category of data that cannot be interpreted as text. The "text" vs. "binary" distinction can sometimes refer to the semantic content of a dossier e.g. a document vs. a digital image. However, it often quoted specifically to whether the individual bytes of a dossier are interpretable as text see character encoding or cannot so be interpreted. When this last meaning is intended, the more specific terms binary format and textual format are sometimes used. Semantically textual data can be represented in binary appearance e.g. when compressed or informats that intermix various sorts of formatting codes, as in the DOC format used by Microsoft Word; contrarily, view data is sometimes represented in textual profile e.g. the X PixMap abstraction format used in the X Window System.