Wayne Parham Messages: 18795 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
You're right about the storage of digital media - The read/write heads are all analog. Magnetic, optical, whatever - This is an analog world and digital information is simply a quantified representation of it that's easy to reliably store, process and transmit in a consistent manner. No matter what you're doing, if you process something digitally, it has to first be converted from analog and then at the end, it has to be converted back to analog. In fact, many digital circuits are just like analog ones that are made to be used either in saturation or cutoff, but nowhere in between. The simplicity of that arrangement is what makes it robust.