Sunday, June 17, 2007

When I was in grade school in the 50’s ... that’s the 1950’s for you Y2K whiners ... the number to beat was a Million. We could not imagine living for a million hours. We could imagine living on the interest on a million dollars. We lived in fear of megaton yielding nuclear bombs. Commercially viable computers had barely been invented, but the first diskettes held less than a million bytes. The term “megabyte” hadn’t been invented, yet. Fast forward ...

When I started working in the mid-70’s a Million still loomed large in my psyche. I once programed a giant mainframe computer to print a million digits on 30 some sheets of microfiche, just so I could hold a million of something in my hand. Ever the uber-geek, I would carry the microfiche around and show people I could hold a “Mega-digit” in my hand. Cool! Fast forward ...

I’m not here to tell you a million is mega-passe. Our PCs have thousand megabyte (1 gigabyte) memories, store 100 gigabytes on their disks.

In fact, a billion is giga-passe.

The new number to beat is a million million (a.k.a. thousand billion, a.k.a. trillion) and we’re in Tera country now 12 zeros after the first significant digit. I often ask people who would be smarter if they didn’t know they were smart, “What is the speed of light in furlongs/fortnight?” Turns out the answer is a little more than 1.8 terafurlongs/fortnight. Really fast forward ...

In the March issue of Wired magazine, there was a piece focusing on tera numbers ... terabyte, teradollar, terawatt, and teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second - measures the speed of a computer). If you’re a numbers person, you’ll like this. How many teradollars is the Iraq war costing the US? How many hours of Internet porn can be stored in a terabyte? How many years would a terawatt power the electricity needs of New York City? How many pocket calculators equal 1 teraflop? How many Xbox 360s? Enquiring minds want to know.

Click on the image to see a readable version ...
And check out Wired Magazine

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Technology
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