I think the "in respect to time" and "amount of bit" part is the continuum. You can then think of your communication as a stream and rate. Their computer had a

I think the "in respect to time" and "amount of bit" part is the continuum. You can then think of your communication as a stream and rate. Their computer had a million cores in it's original design, but each could only talk with ~20 nearest neighbors. Weirdly information might begin to mimic simple fluid dynamics in this environment. I suspect that's why Feynman could build those equations as well as discover that they only needed the 5 buffers. Though I can fully sympathize with the program manager in not wanting to reason in terms of differentials.