“To avoid overflow, counters were updated probabilistically to maintain an estimate of the logarithm of the count.” Stuff like this really makes me love what t

“To avoid overflow, counters were updated probabilistically to maintain an estimate of the logarithm of the count.” Stuff like this really makes me love what the pioneers of CS did in the past. In the past, they were counting every byte and every register while nowadays, programmers make things without considering the impact it will have on the HW.