Overflown

Overflow occurs when you run out of digits. You can experience this yourself with your fingers - try counting to eleven and see where that gets you. If you are like me, instead of using your toes you will go to go back to the first finger and somehow remember that you are past ten. This going back to first digit (and remembering) is overflow.

This example is slightly weird because we don’t use zero in our finger arithmetics: our digits are labeled from one to ten. In school decimal arithmetics we use digits from 0 to 9 and here overflow occurs when we move past 9 which changes back to 0. The rest overflows to the second decimal place.

In the comic, since it’s about computers, we only have digits one and zero which is called binary arithmetics. As soon as we add 1 to 1 we get a… 0. The rest spills over and this is not shown for a reason: computers have limited memory and in some cases they may forget about that spillover.

Many hilarious bugs exist because of this forgetting: in many games - especially the old ones - if you earn enough cash your bank balance might suddenly loop back to zero.