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

Question

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

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Answer 1

Computers work in binary where every digit has one of two states (0 or 1) and is called a bit (binary digit). Whenever you add a bit to something you are basically doubling how many numbers it can represents:

1 bit = 2 numbers (0 and 1).

2 bits = 4 numbers (00, 01, 10, 11)

etc.

We ultimately settled on 8 bits being a fundamental unit of computing called a byte. So everything is done in units of bytes. 8-bits is 1 byte, 16-bits is 2 bytes, 32-bits is 4 bytes, etc.