A better way to put this: instead of saying "it reduces the search space by 9 quintillion," say "it reduces 50% of the search space." Sure, that's a lot, but not nearly as much as trimming 8 bits and saying "it reduces 99.6% of the search space."

i.e., reduce it by close to practically infinity?

A $32 million (1985 dollars) Cray 2 super computer could do 1.9GFlops.

You can now get over 50x that performance for less than a grand in a device that fits in your pocket. I bet those engineers didn't expect that in half a lifetime.