infinibyte

The 512 megabyte miniSD card from my cell phone served as a conversation starter for my son and me the other day. I think our family's first computer had 512 kilobytes of RAM. As I held up the 512MB card, I told my son to picture 1000 desktop computers in our house, together totaling the same amount of RAM as I held on my fingertip. We were looking online at the price of a microSD card to go in the next generation of phone that I will get as part of the "new every two" upgrade. The micro chips look to be about half the size but with 8 times the capacity of the mini chip I got two years ago.

During his college career, my son will probably get to use computers with terabytes of memory. Naturally, he wanted to know what was bigger than a terabyte. We looked it up and found a list all the way from bit up to the most amusing of the names, brontobyte (unofficial).

1 Bit = Binary Digit
8 Bits = 1 Byte
1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1000 Zettabyte = 1 Yottabyte
1000 Yottabyte = 1 Brontobyte

Two days later I was skimming through the Knoxville Blog Network and saw something about bits and bytes that I might have overlooked if my son and I hadn't just been talking about it on Monday. An entry from Think Time had a link to a fascinating post by James S. Huggins that gives you an idea of how much memory it takes to hold various types of information.