Beyond The Brontobyte

You’ve heard of the “Stone Age” and the “Information Age” and the “Wired Age,” but what about the “Petabyte Age?” In case you missed it, a petabyte is just another giant unit of measure for digital information. And most of us are well familiar with megabytes and gigabytes when talking about our personal computers. But the Pedabyte is a different story — kind of hard to wrap our heads around. To show just how massive a petabyte is, if you were to count all the bits in one petabyte, at the rate of one bit per second, it would take 285 million years to do so. That’s big! In fact one Petabyte could hold approximately twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets full of documents — or 500 billion pages of standard printed text. And it would take about 500 million floppy disks to store the same amount of data. But there’s more! Beyond the Petabyte is the Exabyte, the Zettabyte, the Yottabyte — and finally (at…