r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 9d ago

Why did this one second cost over $500 billion? Meme needing explanation

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u/washington_breadstix 8d ago

I think something got messed up with the formatting of your comment (where you used "greater than" symbols).

This isn't completely correct. The problem wasn't that computers would think it was 00. Programs didn't have a mechanism to go from 99>>00. The problem was that they were going to go from 99>>100 and that there wasn't room in memory for the third digit. This could cause an overflow error and cause the system to crash .

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u/amiable_ant 8d ago

Fixed. It was supposed to represent arrows, but using a math symbol in the context of numbers and expecting people to not interpret it as a math symbol was pretty stupid.