Why were video game improvements in multiples of 8? (8-bit, 16-bit, 64, etc…)

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Why were video game improvements in multiples of 8? (8-bit, 16-bit, 64, etc…)

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Because IBM System/360 used 8 bits to represent characters, and it was a really influential family of computers. That’s why the popular word size (“word” here is the size of data unit of a CPU) was 8 bits.

If you want to upgrade a CPU design to encode more words in a same instrunction, it makes sense to use a multiple of the previous size, so that’s why we get multiples of 8.

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