Why did 80’s arcade machines mostly only allow 3 character names on the high score leader boards?

Question

I’ve played quite a few arcade games recently and there seems to be a limit on how many characters can be entered on to the leader board this is usually limited to 3 characters, why is this?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Memory.

Imagine computer memory like a whiteboard. You can play a game – but only if ALL of the rules of the game, and anything that needs to be remembered, and anything else for the game can all be written on the whiteboard.

Modern computers have MASSIVE whiteboards. Some of them can have more written on them than an entire library worth of books. But older computers had less space; and when you’re limited in space, you’ve got to limit how much space you use for anything – and so they squeezed the high score section in a little corner of the whiteboard and limited how much you could write there.