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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi

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# Wednesday, January 07, 2009
kilobyte, mb, gb, tb, pb…
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII.  An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years?  From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online.  He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age.  There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive.  The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes."  -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte.  I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]).  And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes?  That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits.  That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.


irony | personal history
Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:36:35 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
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