Humans created more than a zettabyte of digital information by the end of 2010.
A what?
A zettabyte. That’s 2 to the 70th power bytes, which is approximately 10 to the 21st power. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That’s a one followed by 21 zeroes.
I had trouble with that, too. Try this:
1,000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte
1,000 terabytes = 1 petabyte
1 million terabytes = 1 exabyte
1 billion terabytes = 1 zettabyte
Still having trouble? Maybe you’re a visual person. Ok, try this: if you put a zettabyte of data on DVDs, the DVD stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.
I suppose it’s time to toss out my the 20MB hard drive from my first PC.
Nah… I’ll just put it in the box with my Atari Pong console.