With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.

Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...

We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles

Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...

*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then