The Tyranny of Choice, and Other Register-Based Problems

I have a computer in my pocket that has, and I’m rounding down here for dramatic effect, approximately a bazillion gigabytes of RAM. It has more processing cores than I have decent glasses in my cupboard. It can, with a casual flick of its digital wrist, render a video of a cat falling off a sofa in resolutions that are arguably better than real life.

And honestly? It’s all a bit much.

It makes me think back to 1986. I was twelve, hunched over a BBC Micro with aspirations of writing the next Elite (not really, I loved getting into 3D vector graphics, although it was Exile that really made me reach for the next level of coding). My world was a 1MHz 6502 processor, and my language of choice was pure assembly. This wasn't some nostalgic rediscovery; this was the coalface. And at that coalface, you learned one fundamental truth so deeply that it became part of your DNA.

The entire machine, the whole magnificent, beige box of tricks, was run, largely, by just three registers.

Three.

For those who didn't spend their youth wrestling with it, a register is like the CPU's short-term memory. It’s the bit of notepad space the processor uses to do its maths. Modern chips have dozens of them. The 6502 had the grand total of three that you could really work with.

The Accumulator (A), the X register, and the Y register.

A, X, and Y.

That was the entire toolbox. No fancy variable names like player_score or current_level here; it was LDA #$41 and you knew what you were doing with that $41. Everything that ever happened on that screen, every pixel drawn, every bleep booped, every text adventure parsed, had to be forced through the eye of that needle. Not to mention getting it all to fit. We had mere kilobytes – often just 32K in total – to cram in the operating system, the program itself, and all its data.

This unforgiving scarcity, this computational equivalent of trying to pack your entire house into a shoebox, is precisely where my fascination with data compression began. Every single byte mattered. It was the computational equivalent of juggling chainsaws, a badger, and a lit firework, knowing you only had one pair of hands and a very small shed to do it in. And we loved it.

Looking back, I find that, frankly, beautiful.

It’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t come from having endless resources; it comes from the stark, unforgiving constraints of having almost none at all. You didn't have a choice, so you just had to be clever.

Something my phone, with its bazillion gigabytes, could probably learn a thing or two about.