My personal term for the inexact nature of the messy, fuzzy world was muzzy. But then, in 1980, I acquired an Ohio Scientific desktop computer and found prompt, lasting relief. All its operations were built on a foundation of binary arithmetic, in which a 1 was always exactly a 1 and a 0 was a genuine 0, with no fractional quibbling. The 1 of existence, and the 0 of nothingness! I fell in love with the purity of digital and learned to write code, which became a lifelong refuge from muzzy math.

Of course, digital values still had to be stored in…