2.2.04

Do you ever wonder about how big things can get? Remember when Bill Gates famously said that a computer with 640 kilobytes of memory would be all that we would ever need? He was forgetting about Microsoft's capacity for writing ballooning software and storage routines! Anyway, 1 kilobyte represents 1,024 binary digits (bits) of data and here are some monsters to think about. Bear in mind that people often write 1Kb as 1,000 bytes and to keep things simple and that's what you're about to see here Kilobyte (Kb) 1,000 bytes 2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page Megabyte (Mb) 1,000,000 bytes 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk Gigabyte (Gb) 1,000,000,000 bytes 1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with books Terabyte (Tb) 1,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Terabyte: 50,000 trees made into paper and printed. Petabyte (Pb)1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001) Exabyte (Eb) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999 See this page for the source of that fabulous information. What next? DW

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