David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…In 16 bits, you can represent numbers up to 65,536, so that's two to the 16th. You can do interesting things passing 16 bits around at once. There are some really, really fun aspects to this. If you look at pictures of these processors, what did the 8080, the 8-bit processor look like? And then you look at what the 8086, the 16-bit processor, looked like? You can see this. In the 8008 processor that's only eight bits, you see only nine pins coming off of the little chip. There's the eight pins for the data bits, and then I think there's one more control pin. If you look at the 8086 processor, it's a much longer rectangle with 16, 17, maybe 20 pins coming off of it. You see this physically represented in the chip. The further we get in the computing world, the more abstract stuff becomes. It's always fun to go back in history when these concepts were so grounded in our physical reality that's easily observable since everything was so much bigger too.…

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