30 Jul
2016
30 Jul
'16
11:50 p.m.
A "standard" 80-column punched card held 80 12-bit columns, or 120 bytes.
1000 cards stacked up took roughly a foot, to get 120,000 bytes
So to store a megabyte would take about 8 1/3 feet of cards.
A gigabyte would be over a mile and a half high.
A terabyte would be over 1500 miles high (half the width of the USA)
A petabyte stack would be over six times the distance to the moon...
Exponential growth may seem like business as normal today, but in reality,
it boggles the mind...
Steve
>
> Of course, those cards take time to fill and empty, which should be
> part of the bandwidth computation.