Not dumb, a great question.
On the microprocessor level the hardware is designed to always read a certain number of digits, called “bits” in this case, and 4 bits become a “nibble”, 8 bits are a “byte”.
So a 16 bit microprocessor would read the value “one” as
0000 0000 0000 0001
and read “ten” as
0000 0000 0000 1010
So in older days, the processor size was a big deal, I played a lot of video games so I remember that the Nintendo was 8-bit, we then 16-bit systems (Sega and Super Nintendo). and then 32/64 bit processors with Nintendo 64, etc.
For the most part we’ve stuck at 64 bit for our processors for many reasons.
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