Gads, we're a bunch of old fellas, aren't we.
Some years later, the 0/1 thing was an amusement to us budding computer scientists as we pontificated with undergraduate certainty about a world in which 1s and 0s didn't actually exist. Many years later in grad school, we got to prove that any two distinct symbols would work, not just 0 and 1. It is intuitively true, but we had to do all manner of fancy theorem proving to show exactly why.
Although my education covered analogue, digital hardware, and software, I never forgot the famous Shakespeare quote that has kept me welded to traditional photography:
All the world's a stage, and digital is but a bit player ...