In the 1970’s when multimeter manufacturers were very proud of how many digits their products could display, manufacturers started to specify the maximum resolution of the multimeter based on the digital display. For example, the term 4½ digits refers to the number of digits displayed on the readout of a multimeter. A 4½ digit multimeter would have four full digits that display values from 0 to 9 and one half digit that could only display 0 or 1. This digital multimeter could show positive or negative values from 0 to 9,999, in counts of resolution.