We here at TheNextWeb feel the need to impart small parts of our vast use of Google knowledge on the occasion. Now, what is bigger than a Gigabyte? A Terebyte of course. And then? Most people know Petabyte, but what follows is harder indeed.
Take a look:
1000 GB = 1 Terabyte (TB)
1000 TB = 1 Petabyte (PB)
1000 PB = 1 Exabyte (EB)
1000 EB = 1 Zettabyte (ZB)
1000 ZB = 1 Yottabyte (YB)
Put in a much more mild way, a Yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB. There, now you know.
I remember my first HD and its 40 kb. …
I’m sure you meant 40MB, the early 5.25 floppy disks could already contain 360 kB. I remember my first hard disk too, I still have it, it was a 20MB drive. At the time I thought I’d never use all of it, since it could contain more than 50 times more than a floppy disk :-)
Actually, he may be right. My first HD was 5 Kb — yes, “Kb” — on a system I worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the 70s.
Now, the system itself was, at the time, almost twenty years old, and the “hard drive” was primitive in ways that are difficult to comprehend now. But the geniuses who programmed that computer did amazing things with just 5Kb of memory.
Oh, didn’t I mention that this “hard drive” was used as RAM?
It’s easy to forget, in these days of terabyte drives and gigabyte RAM, that the computing power that put men on the moon will fit into a modern watch, with room to spare; that an entire operating system once fit into 4Kb, and that was considered excessive; that it was once difficult to believe that you could fill a 10Mb hard drive.
I’m not engaging in blind nostalgia, here; there are good reasons for a “simple” word processor to occupy 500Mb of disk space. That said, we would do well to remember what we have, in the main, lost: the elegance of the small.
shurely terAbyte?
Those seem to be approximate values, since it’s really 1024GB in a TB and so on and so forth.
You sir, are correct. TNW is failing at searching GOOG properly.
My first Hard drive was only 120MB… even my mp3 player has more storage capacity now.
Well now, 1024 is the binary and computer standard, but manufacturing companies use the 1000 standard. So in that case, the above article is correct. Thus, a 1TB hdd is only 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
@answers when can we expect the first Yottabyte computer for under $ 500,- ?
I wonder how long before Yottabyte’s become standard tech-speak and the KB or even the MB becomes completely obsolete to the point where the tiniest file created by a program can no longer be small enough to be measured in such terms. I mean with a few minor exception, its incredibly hard to find or make a file that measures in plain bytes…even a blank document is 1kb. We’re only just bringing TB’s into our homes as they were nothing. I remember the Days when a GB seemed like something only scientists would have a use for, and yet here we are, with games and software consuming Ounces of them in an instant!
The only reason we are using more HD space is for HD video, games and music. Most applications are barely a couple of MB’s, and will probably stay that way. (The smallest program you can make under Windows is ~3KB)
So, um.. Used Unix much lately? TONS of small configuration files or shell scripts, many under 1KB in size