Digital: The witches' zero times

If the world consisted only of digital data, no one would be able to read these long strings of zeros and ones. The 'digital world' is that mysterious place where only computers can find their way around. Strictly speaking, this is the core meaning of the word 'digital', it refers to the binary world where the language of transistors rules.

Colloquially, we have long used the word 'digital' in a much broader sense. We use it to refer to 'digital technology' as a whole, i.e. those machines and calculators that use gates, counters and flip-flops to generate comprehensible and logical results from zeros and ones, which we then admire on the monitor.