Eli5: What is the real difference between analog and digital?

Question

I tried looking it up, and my brain just wasn’t making sense of it, but I haven’t had coffee yet so.

In: 0

Answer 1

think of it like this…. if you look at a digital signal of 1’s and 0’s on an oscilloscope, it will look like a flat plateau mountain… for the period of time its 1 its at the top of the plateau, and when its at the bottom of the mountain, its at 0.

if we look at that same series of signals with a much faster rate, each plateau becomes less and less wide and becomes instead the point of a curve. the curve is now analog. because each point of the curve is actually a duration of the plateau, you can only estimate the number.