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Right where to start

Okay, you've seen a computer chip right, big black thing with dozens of little silver legs coming off it, well each of those legs has a job to do. Your most basic job of any chip is, put electricity out of a combination of one or more legs, based on the combination of electricity going into one or more legs. That's true whether we're talking about the Motorola 6800 that Baby Pacman uses, or the whizbang processor in your phone.

In most chips the question of "Is there electricity going into this leg" is a rather coarse one, in that there's no "Well yeah a bit," it's either "Yes there is" or "No there isn't," and back in the day, chips ran on five volts. New ones run on 3.3 or even lower, but back then it was 5v (some used 12v too, for example some memory chips used 5v to read and 12v to write, but we're concerned with 5v now).

So the question we've gotta ask ourselves is, does four and a half volts equal a "Yes there is" or a "No there isn't"