3. Vocabulary for Measuring Information
If a Grain of Sand were One Byte of Information . . .
1 Gigabyte =
1 billion bytes
patch of sand—
9” square, 1’ deep
1 Terabyte =
1 trillion bytes
a sandbox—
24’ square, 1’ deep
1 Petabyte =
1,000 terabytes
a mile long beach—
100’ wide , 1’ deep
1 Megabyte =
1 million bytes
a tablespoon of sand
1 Zetabyte =
1,000 exabytes
the same beach—
along the entire US coast
1 Exabyte =
1,000 petabytes
the same beach—
from Maine to North Carolina
1 Yottabyte =
1,000 zetabytes (24 Zeroes)
enough info to bury the entire
US under 296 feet of sand