ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

64B/66B encoding

Hi there! Have you ever played with Legos? You know how you can snap two Lego pieces together and they fit perfectly? Well, in the world of computers, they have their own pieces called "bits".

Now imagine you want to send a message to your friend using these Lego pieces. You decide to connect a bunch of Legos to make a long train and send it to your friend. But here's the thing - your friend lives far away, and during the journey, some of the Legos might fall off or get damaged.

To make sure your friend receives your whole message intact, you need a way to protect it. That's where 64b/66b encoding comes in.

It's like building a special kind of train with extra support to ensure all the Legos stay put during the journey. Instead of snapping one piece onto the next, we use a special math trick to add up groups of bits and turn them into new bits.

This trick helps us detect if any bits have been lost or damaged during the transmission. If that happens, we can fix it by using special methods to reconstruct the message.

So, 64b/66b encoding is a way of sending computer data with special support to ensure the message arrives safely and intact, just like your Lego trains.