Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

18%
+0 −7
#1: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2021-05-08T08:42:58Z (almost 3 years ago)
Why is -1 needed to get 65,535 from a 2^16 binary power calculation?
It was stated in the Wikipedia article [65,535](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65,535):

> 65535 occurs frequently in the field of computing because it is `2^16-1` (one less than 2 to the 16th power), which is the highest number that can be represented by an unsigned 16-bit binary number.

I didn't understand from this passage why is the `-1` needed to get the number 65,535 from the power operation.