I would like to bid a fond farewell to these much loved measurements of data. As blu-ray, HD-DVD, holographic and nano technologies draw nearer, I find myself less in need of words to describe such small amounts of data. Soon we'll all be enjoying tera and peta byte sized harddrives, no doubt full of rubbish. So, before we forget them, join with me in tribute to the smaller measurements of data. Remember the good times. Remember the joy of buying an extra megabyte of RAM. Remeber buying your first hard drive in the gigabytes and thinking 'I'll never need another hard drive again!'. Remember getting 1mb broadband and your amazement at the sheer speed. Well, good bye old friends. I'm sure I'll write something in holo-notepad one day and think. 'You know, this file is ridiculously small.'
I think I can count all 64k worth of crap right on that stick of "ram". Still, hard drives aren't growing that quickly in size, it'll probably be a couple years till we hit terabyte. And if your hard drive contains only legal files *cough* the only way to reasonably fill it is ripping a large portion of your DVD collection to it. To the average user (type and print really) a 5GB drive is more than enough, and even 40GB should be plenty for most of the "Dell gamers". Still, the thought of 6KB/$1 is painful considering we can get... literally... about half a million times better pricing.
'Dell gamers' - (smug laugh) And as far as counting each kb of ram on piccy goes, I opened up my Nans computer (some kind of socket 1 486 i believe) and it did literally have 8 rows of ram each with 8 little blocks on. I think I took a photo with my phone. And the chip had a heatsink stuck on the top, no fan, just a chunk of black metal. I was only fitting a new floppy drive but I spent most of the time just poking around and going 'ooooooooh thats old'
done that before now.... Cor blimey.... that old (Blowing off the dust)... damn how did some of those machine run.. airflow is non-existant!
I think I'll be saying hello to domestic pico-byte HDDs in probably 20 years...... in the meantime I'll not kiss goodbye to gigabytes thanks
i think you mean PETA-Byte... A pico byte would be about 15 billion billion billion times smaller than that 15 meg hdd up there I could write more data with a pencil by drawing a dot! edit: in fact its too small to know its a hard drive, so its all academic really
those sizes may be dead for the likes of you, but in software development they're still alive and kicking and will be for a good long time. Additionally, if you have any high spec packages on your computer, not simple stuff that people new to computers have, you can easily get up the GB's without resorting to downloading masses of files which you wont use. For example: Microsoft Office 2003 takes the better side of 1gb, as does Microsoft Visual Studio, same again for Microsoft Encarta etc. Remember also, that more games these days are getting into crazy sizes - Baldurs gate 2 was 2gb but that thing was a massive game (400+ hrs) , some 40hr games these days are closing in on 2gb.
we'll probably see less of them in day to day use of computers, but alot of things will still only need to use these measures of data, they arnt gonna make file sizes bigger for the sake of it. Then theres software development, frequently use single bytes for holding values and sometimes even single bits if your working with a microcontroller
I can tell you that there is one guaranteed size measurement to never be used, or at lease used so sparingly that it wont even count: nybble (1/2 a byte)
Liquid - Neverwinter nights with all expansions is about 90-100 hours... and 5 GB. BG2 with expansion was 4. A lot of the new games are clocking in at an average of 2.5 GB each nowadays, and give it a year and we'll be seeing DVD only games on the shelf... with 2-3 disks each. And these 2.5 GB titles can be under 10 hours too (see LSL8, XIII). By the way, Raise your hand if youve played through the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 and expansion. That means every single quest. Raise your hand if youve played through the entirety of Icewind Dale and it's expansions (not 2 tho mind you). Again, everything Raise your hand if you've played thru the entirety of Baldur's Gate 1... and explored every map to it's brims Raise your hand if you played through the entirety of Neverwinter Nights - and all it's expansions.. and then some add in modules and such... There goes 500 hours of my life, well spent .
add in every test drive, need for speed, GT, nascar (both ea and papyrus) sprintcar shootout, and hundreds more now coasters of what used to be driving sims there goes my last 8 years.
i filled up a 120gb HDD with a heap of game installs, took me ages but i had everything from HL2 to worms 1
