What does this mean? The point is that transmission and manipulation of data, words, voice, of pictures occurs through the use of binary numbers. A general purpose communications network with multimedia computers as nodes can manipulate and communicate numbers, words, voice, and images. You don't need special purpose hardware for each phenomenon. Also with the move to digital communication, the communication engineer needs to know is the number of bits he has to transmit per second, but not what is being transmitted. In the marketplace, the boundary line between communications and computer companies is becoming fuzzy. Future competition in the combined computer-communications industry will be fierce. One of the reasons for the breakup of the phone system is AT&T's desire to penetrate the computer market. To counter AT&T's move, IBM has entered the communications market. Neither has had much success in the others territory.