People in the digital trades like to say that everything can be reduced to zeroes and ones. That is wrong, of course. Pictures, sounds, words and numbers, however, can be coded as a series of binary digits (0 or 1) and assembled into groups called bytes, conventionally 8 bits long.
The great virtue of digital encoding is that, with a little care, content can be reproduced endlessly without change or loss.
The transistor is a very small switching device with two states, on and off that can be used to represent the binary encoding of content. First dozens,then hundreds, thousands and millions of transistors can be etched onto tiny ceramic chips which can themselves be reproduced endlessly and cheaply.
