And you! Friendless, brainless, helpless, hopeless! Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed, in Greenland?!
Vizzini, The Princess Bride
- Shift register (Wikipedia)
A shift register is a type of digital circuit using a cascade of flip-flops where the output of one flip-flop is connected to the input of the next. They share a single clock signal, which causes the data stored in the system to shift from one location to the next. By connecting the last flip-flop back to the first, the data can cycle within the shifters for extended periods, and in this configuration they were used as computer memory, displacing delay-line memory systems in the late 1960s and early 1970s.