What exactly do people mean when they say the NES was an 8 bit console? I know that a bit in computer terms is a single piece of data that can be 1 or 0, but 8 of these doesn’t sound like enough to do all of the things you’d need to play a game like Mario. So what element of the console was 8 bits?
In: Technology
#ELI5
**Ever see a car [odometer](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/M6YJHP/automobile-analogue-speedometer-and-odometer-M6YJHP.jpg)?**
Let’s look at the top odometer.
How many digits are there? There are six digits there.
What’s the biggest number that odometer can show? It can show anything from 0 to 999,999. Right?
Can you show the number 2,000,000? No, you cannot, because there aren’t enough digits.
Okay so far???
Now imagine a long street. Starcross Street. It’s super duper long, miles long! And there are houses along the street. And all those houses need addresses.
But you’re only allowed six digits on any address. You can only put up to six numbers on the house, to tell people what that address is.
Can there be a 4210 Starcross Street? Yes. That’s only four digits.
Can there be a 2000000 Starcross Street? No. Because that’s more than six digits.
Okay so far???
Computers (including consoles) have memory, we all know that. Every spot in memory has an address.
And just like a house, we need to know the *address* of every spot in memory, so that we can say things like, “Go to 4210 Starcross street (house/memory) and find my top score”.
Wrapping it up…
The NES was “8-bit”.
That’s kind of like saying, there’s a lot of memory on the NES, but the **address of each spot can only go up to 8 digits**.
The NES can have a memory spot with the address 4210, because that’s 4 digits.
But the NES cannot have a memory spot with the address 200,000,000, because that’s 9 digits.
So it’s kind of like saying, how many bits (8-bit, 16-bit, etc) gives you an idea of the biggest address that the system can use. Which also gives you an idea of how much memory there is!
THAT’S THE BASIC IDEA
But beware! Beware! This has been simplified a lot, and is NOT entirely accurate, it’s not entirely true! But for the sake of explaining it, that’s the idea.
EVERYONE: Yes, I used decimal and not binary. That distinction isn’t going to help OP. Please let’s keep things simple in the spirit of ELI5.
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