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I thought a gigabyte was a lot. I was getting ready to think about having storage space in terabytes, which are about 1,000 gigabytes. But for the coming generation of 64-bit computers, we’re already starting to talk about exabytes, which are over a billion gigabytes:
The great advantage of 64-bit systems is seen in memory-hungry applications such as CAD: while a 32-bit processor can address a working memory of no more than four gigabytes, the 64-bit systems have 16 exabytes at their disposal (1 EB = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes).
It was only 1997 when the notion of a device that could store a terabyte of data was science fiction, described in Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey:
Nothing could have looked more harmless and innocent than the perfectly standard terabyte memory tablet, used with millions of braincaps every day.
Exabytes? I wasn’t even familiar with the word until this morning.
