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

At its most basic, analog means something has some kind of spectrum or range, and digital means it can only have certain (“discrete”) settings.

So analog is like an old radio dial, you can set it to 1, or 2, or 1.5, or 1.9736, or any other value you want on the dial.

And discrete is like a light switch, or the pullstring on a ceiling fan. It can be set to “Off”, “Low”, or “High”, but it can’t be set to any intermediate value between those options.