Sign-Magnitude Converter

About this calculator

Sign-magnitude is one of the earliest schemes computers used to represent signed integers in binary: the leftmost bit is a dedicated sign bit (0 for positive, 1 for negative), and the remaining bits store the number's absolute value directly, unlike two's complement where negative numbers are encoded by inverting and adding one.

Sign-magnitude is simple to understand and easy to convert to and from decimal by hand, which is why it's still widely taught as the first step in binary number representation — but it has real drawbacks, like having two representations of zero (+0 and −0) and needing separate addition/subtraction logic, which is why almost all modern hardware uses two's complement instead. Computer science students and instructors use converters like this to build intuition for how signed binary representations work before moving on to two's complement.