ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

B8ZS

Okay kiddo, so sometimes when people want to send information over wires, they use long and short electrical pulses to represent the 1s and 0s of the information. But sometimes the wires get a little confused and don't know if they should be reading the longs or the shorts as the 1s and 0s.

So people came up with something called b8zs to help with this problem. B8zs stands for Bipolar with 8 Zero Substitution. That's just a fancy way of saying that if there are too many zeroes in a row, changes are made to the electrical pulses so that the confusion doesn't happen.

It's kind of like when you're playing a game and your friend keeps saying the same thing over and over again, so you have to add something extra to make it different and not confusing. That's what b8zs does for the wires carrying information.