How much data is there in a byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte or yottabyte?

"Whenever we discuss quantities of data, we tend to do it in the abstract. We speak of a kilobyte, or a megabyte or a gigabyte without really knowing what it represents." [James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door, via Dane Carlson's Weblog]

Very cool link! Note that about the last measure of collected human knowledge used is "2 Petabytes: All U. S. academic research libraries."

[The Shifted Librarian]

An appropriate item to dive back into the upcoming quarter after a brief interlude on the beaches of Cancun. Also appropriate that this little tidbit on making abstractions about bytes more concrete reaches me by way of a chain of weblog links.

4:16:45 PM •  • comment