Suppose you had 1 megabyte of data that comprise the pages of a book? In standard 12 point text, printed on single sheets of A4, the pile of paper would be about 1.3 inches. The phrase “As Moore’s Law continues to bite” would occupy about a quarter of one line of text in the pile, and a human “speed reader” would take approximately 20 minutes to find it (assuming the phrase was roughly in the middle of the pile).Suppose you now had 1 gigabyte of data. The pile of paper would now be around 110 feet high.
263 gigabytes: the pile of paper would now be as tall as Mt. Everest.
1 terabyte is approximately four times the height of Mt. Everest. Finding “Moore’s Law…” is now a more significant challenge!
So when does your pile exceed the height of the moon?