I absolutely love that you do this. There appears to be a trend to discount the value of knowing the low-level details of these sorts of things -- but even if you never actually work at that level, knowing what's happening "behind the scenes" increases and deepens understanding and can make high-level things that seem arbitrary or nonsensical make sense.
First principles and curiosity > blithe unconcern about the "magic box". Likewise, coders who don't have enough understanding all the way down the stack including hardware are merely engineer posers in it for a paycheck.
One reason for writing the post and trying to create GIF-images from binary, was to come as close as possible to GIF format and especially the LZW-algorithm. To understand it in an intuitive way. To get a bit closer to the minds who created the algorithm in the first place.
