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By Root 1068 0

kilobits, naturally enough. After all, engineers had coined the word kilobuck—“a scientist’s idea of a short way to say ‘a thousand dollars,’”♦ The New York Times helpfully explained in 1951. The measures of information climbed up an exponential scale, as the realization dawned in the 1960s that everything to do with information would now grow exponentially. That idea was casually expressed by Gordon Moore, who had been an undergraduate studying chemistry when Shannon jotted his note and found his way to electronic engineering and the development of integrated circuits. In 1965, three years before he founded the Intel Corporation, Moore was merely, modestly suggesting that within a decade, by 1975, as many as 65,000 transistors could be combined on a single wafer of silicon. He predicted a doubling every year or two—a doubling of the number of components that could be packed on a chip, but then also, as it turned out, the doubling of all kinds of memory capacity and processing speed, a halving of size and cost, seemingly without end.

Kilobits could be used to express speed of transmission as well as quantity of storage. As of 1972, businesses could lease high-speed lines carrying data as fast as 240 kilobits per second. Following the lead of IBM, whose hardware typically processed information in chunks of eight bits, engineers soon adopted the modern and slightly whimsical unit, the byte. Bits and bytes. A kilobyte, then, represented 8,000 bits; a megabyte (following hard upon), 8 million. In the order of things as worked out by international standards committees, mega- led to giga-, tera-, peta-, and exa-, drawn from Greek, though with less and less linguistic fidelity. That was enough, for everything measured, until 1991, when the need was seen for the zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and the inadvertently comic sounding yottabyte (1,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000). In this climb up the exponential ladder information left other gauges behind. Money, for example, is scarce by comparison. After kilobucks, there were megabucks and gigabucks, and people can joke about inflation leading to terabucks, but all the money in the world, all the wealth amassed by all the generations of humanity, does not amount to a petabuck.

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000. When the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary began digitizing its contents in 1987 (120 typists; an IBM mainframe), they estimated its size at a gigabyte. A gigabyte also encompasses the entire human genome. A thousand of those would fill a terabyte. A terabyte was the amount of disk storage Larry Page and Sergey Brin managed to patch together with the help of $15,000 spread across their personal credit cards in 1998, when they were Stanford graduate students building a search-engine prototype, which they first called BackRub and then renamed Google. A terabyte is how much data a typical analog television station broadcasts daily, and it was the size of the United States government’s database of patent and trademark records when it went online in 1998. By 2010, one could buy a terabyte disc drive for a hundred dollars and hold it in the palm of one hand. The books in the Library of Congress represent about 10 terabytes (as Shannon guessed), and the number is many times more when images and recording music are counted. The library now archives web sites; by February 2010 it had collected 160 terabytes’ worth.

As the train hurtled onward, its passengers sometimes felt the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history. Moore’s law had looked simple on paper, but its consequences left people struggling to find metaphors with which to understand their experience. The computer