If you're an iMac user you may safely disregard this entire paragraph. Sure, given that the required resolution of information is not overly ambitious. To effectively press my case about the inequitable distribution of jelly beans with my older brother, it was necessary to expound at some length on the concept of quantity. As we all learned in school while not paying much attention, these symbols have unique properties that words don't have. If you were looking for a language-neutral representation for information in a computer memory, numbers would seem to be a good candidate.
Computers store information as numbers.
This concept is probably not epiphanous for you, but with computers, the slick part comes in the choice of the symbols which represent the number. If the quantity is something separate from its representation, then almost any symbol set would do as long as the symbols are distinguishable from each other and used in a consistent manner. While counting to one may not seem like the stuff of Nobel prizes to you, computers don't have fingers and are therefore not hung-up on quantities like 10. While they don't have light bulbs connected to them, these switches do consume power when they're turned on, but not when they're turned off. I suspect that in Battle Creek Michigan there is still a warehouse full of magic decoder rings patiently waiting for the tides of fashion to recall them to the fingers of a new generation.