Fry's Electronics is selling a 1 Terabyte hard drive. Let's put this in perspective. We'll compare it to the humble, all but forgotten, floppy. A floppy can hold 1.44 Megabytes. That sounds like a lot, a Mega being a million and all, but compared to a Terabyte? OK, by illbegotten calculations, to equal the storage capacity of the mighty Terabyte, you would need 700,000 floppies! Stacked on top of each other, this stack would be 1.4 miles high. Laid out like tiles, it would cover an acre. It would fill, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a good size cubicle. You can buy 1000 floppies for 21 cents a piece. 700,000 floppies would cost you $147,000,which makes Fry's price for a terabyte drive of about $250 a steal.
A page of text is 2Kbytes or 0.02 Meg, so on a Terabyte hard drive, you could store,
1,000,000,000,000/2000= 500,000,000 pages of text, FIVE HUNDRED MILLION PAGES of text regardless of the text itself- five hundred million pages of Shakespeare or five hundred million pages of self absorbed nonsensical ramblings of a lonely engineer.
This is what happens if calculators fall into the hands of the wrong people.
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I remember my electrical engineer friend raving about how blazingly fast his 486 computer was. Another friend once bought a computer from Circuit City with a humungous 740 MB hard drive.
Moore's Law... gotta love it.
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