Bigger Bits and Bytes

If you haven't already heard this bit of Internet legend, the search engine giant, Google, derived its name from the mathematical term "googol."

The story goes like this (thanks to Wikipedia): "A googol is the large number 10¹⁰⁰, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Milton was nine years old at the time. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)."

It's difficult for us puny humans to wrap our minds around gigantic numbers, so we just stick a label of them - like "gajillion," and leave it at that.

But while our ability to accurately conceive of "huge" remains unchanged, we do adjust to ever-increasing relative "hugeness."

Take for example computer storage.

With my first computer, storage was all contained on a floppy disk - which held about 5 MB of storage. Think about it - that's one - ONE - of your digital photos. Maybe.

Slowly, we moved from a few megabytes of storage to hundreds, and finally to that magic "gigabyte!" Didn't that sound grand?

But why stop there? My present external hard drive (one of them) holds 500 gigabytes. And many computers sold today come with a terabyte or or more of onboard storage.

What's next? Geeknosticators suggest that it's the petabyte.

But let's back up for a moment. What does all of this mean?

Some basics:

Computer data is measured in "bits." " A bit is a binary digit, taking a value of either 0 or 1. Binary digits are a basic unit of information storage and communication in digital computing and digital information theory." (Wikipedia.) These ons and offs, ones and zeros, are strung together to represent information. Think of Morse Code, the dots and dashes. Dot-dot-dot becomes an S. Dash-Dash-Dash is an O. That's more or less how bits of information work, as well.

"A group of 8 bits in a computer is called a byte. A byte is the most common unit of measurement for computer architectures (megabytes, mebibytes, gigabytes, gibibytes, et cetera)."

Thus you will see your documents stored as "250 kB," or 250 kilobytes. Or perhaps a photo will take up 5 MB (megabytes).

Once upon a time, we thought of computer storage in terms of kilobytes, but that was rapidly replaced by megabytes. I can remember the excitement I experienced when I got a computer with a whole gigantic 4 megabytes of storage. I can also remember having to archive just about everything on floppy disks because of how truly puny that storage was.

The gigabyte limit has been around for while (the next power of 10 for storage), but moved rapidly from a few gigabytes to the hundreds of gigabytes one finds commonly on newer computers, and removable drives.

The powers are named like this:

1000(1) - kilo

1000(2) - mega

1000(3) - giga

1000(4) - tera

1000(5) - peta

1000(6) - exa

1000(7) - zetta

1000(8) - yotta

The terabyte marker was supposed to be the next common general capacity parlance, but experts are suggesting that the terabyte was just a flash as we raced by. According to the techies at Slashdot.com, "I had been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it is 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we are about to see data warehouses — running on commercial database management systems — that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data."

Your home petabyte computer won't be far behind.

To put that in perspective as Wired.com tells us:

1 terabyte = 260,000 songs

20 terabytes = all the photos uploaded to Facebook.com in a month

30 terabytes = all the videos on YouTube

1 petabyte = all the data processed at Google in a little over an hour.

Maybe there really will be enough room for all your family photos!