But that is not a number the everyday brain can deal with. It has no bearing on everyday living. So I propose we enlarge each individual memory location to a scale that can be readily understood by the human brain.

Suppose each bit was represented by a 2 inch card, with a 0 or a 1 on the back of it. A group of 8 of these cards, laying side by side, would take up 16 inches, and would represent one byte of information. By using playing cards, it becomes easier to comprehend the task of managing the individual bits in a byte, just as the CPU in a computer must do.

The $64,000 question is: Given 64 MB of RAM, how far would it stretch if each bit were 2 inches wide? Well folks I did the arithmetic and the result is stunning. Should you ever be placed in charge of managing such project, your cards, even when placed side by side, would extend over half way around the surface of the globe, a little more than 17,000 miles.

Lets take this one step farther. How much would 64MB of information weigh, if each bit were as heavy as a marble? This is reasonable, since a person could easily carry around enough bytes of storage to represent their entire name, if they had a small sack. But 64MB? Hold on to your ass, Fred because we're Eastbound and truckin' with a load a load of marbles that would weigh in at over 40 million tons.

We're lucky that mankind is excelling is areas of miniaturization. It looks as if continuous data density increases are going to be part of mankind's evolution from this point forward.  Imagine a day when a device the size of an earring captures your entire life, day in and day out, in sound and video, for instant recall at anytime.  It is most certainly coming, and except for the size, it's already here.

*****

Email from Tim Edward:

There is a small flaw in your calculation.
1 MB does not equal 1,000,000 bytes
it actually equals 1,048,576 bytes
8,388,608 bits
Take this for 64 MB and you get
536,870,912 bits !!! (NOT 512 million bits)
if each bit was 2 inches long ,
1,073,741,824 inches (which happens to be exactly a Gig of inches! :)
89,478,485.33 feet
29,826,161.77 yards
16,946.682828 (5,280 feet in a mile)

Funny how we started with different numbers but cam up with the same answer!! :)


BUT, on the weight; I think I have to disagree

40, 000,000 tons = 80,000,000,000 pounds
80,000,000,000 pounds / 536,870,912 bits (in 64 Meg) = 149.01 pounds / bit
Pretty BIG marbles !!!

Let me know if I made any mistakes in my math.

*****

Yeah, I was just rounding everything to keep it simple

Here is a new one for you:. 

From: mark.trainer@firstunion.com [mailto:mark.trainer@firstunion.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 11:46 AM
To: Mastrilli, Frank
Subject: Computers, Speed, and Distance

Frank, I was playing with numbers and this is interesting.  See if there is
a flaw in my logic.

I was on the train today thinking about today's computers, and how the new
PCs are executing well over 1 billion instructions per second.  That number
is so far removed from our ordinary experience that I decided to try to
relate it to something that could be understood in a different way.

For instance, lets pretend you are going to process instructions that have
been laid out in a sequential fashion before you.   Each instruction is
exactly 1 inch long.  So lets get a few "inches per hour" calculations
going.

Since there are 5280 feet in a mile it follows that there are 63360 inches
in a mile.  So one could say 1 MPH = 63360 Inches Per Hour.  Or, 1 MPH =
17.6 inches per second ((63360 inches / (60 secs * 60 min)).  This seems
reasonable.

So the question I wanted to know, is......how fast would you have to be
moving forward to process these 1 inch instructions at a PC rate of 1
billion instructions per second?  Or put another way, how fast is 1 billion
inches per second converted to miles per hour?

I believe that would be 1,000,000 instructions per second = 15.78 miles a
second (1,000,000 / 63360).  Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, that
would be 15.78 times 3600 which is 56818 miles per hour.

Can this be right?  For some reason my first attempt to calculate this came
out much, much higher.  Like 62 million MPH.  But I can't figure out now
how I got that.  Which is why I was writing to you in the first place but
now that I've redone the calculations, they seem more reasonable.

How long would it take to accelerate to this speed if you accelerated at 1
G ?  Or to make it easier, how long would it take to accelerate to this
speed if you added 60 MPH to your speed every second?  Looks like 946
seconds, or 15 minutes of brain squishing acceleration to reach 56,818 MPH.

See Ya!

Mark

****

From: Mastrilli, Frank
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 1:56 PM
To: 'mark.trainer@firstunion.com'
Subject: RE: Computers, Speed, and Distance


Assumption : 1,000,000,000 instructions/second = 1,000,000,000
inches/second

Simply substituting the unit of inches for the unit instructions which has
no direct conversion.

Using scientific notation, simply convert inches/second to miles/hour :



1x10^9 inches        1 foot         1 mile        3600 seconds
56818181.8182 miles
       --------  X   ------     X   -------   X   ------------   =
-------------------
       second        12 inches      5280 feet     1 hour
hour


Each of the three factors 1/12 ; 1/5280 and 3600/1 are all equal to 1.
So we are simply multiplying by values of 1 to convert units.
When a unit on top is multiplied by a unit on bottom, they cancel each
other
out.

After the first computation we are left with 83333333.3333 feet/second.
(inches cancel out)
After the second computation we are left with 15782.8282 miles/second.
(feet
cancel out)
After the third computation we are left with 56818181.8182 miles/hour.
(seconds cancel out)

Roughly 56.8 million miles/hour.  (Your first answer was closer)

The speed of light is 186,300 miles/second or 670,680,000 miles/hour.
Roughly 670.7 million miles/hour.

To "process" 1 billion inches/second, you would have to move at 8.47% the
speed of light.

I would have to pull out a physics book to figure out how long it would
take
you to obtain this speed accelerating at 1G.

In this paragraph from your original e-mail :

****************************************************************************

**
I believe that would be 1,000,000 instructions per second = 15.78 miles a
second (1,000,000 / 63360).  Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, that
would be 15.78 times 3600 which is 56818 miles per hour.
****************************************************************************

**
You switched from 1 billion to 1 million so your answer of 56818 miles per
hour was off by a factor of 1000.

Let me know if the way I formatted this e-mail was retained when you
received it.
In that line of scientific notation all the dashed lines should be on the
same line.

I am composing another e-mail regarding the one you sent yesterday and will
send it before I leave today.

Later - Frank

****

"Mastrilli, Frank" <fmastrilli@matrix-rehab.com> on 04/02/2002 02:34:50 PM

To:   Mark Trainer/CMG/USR/FTU@WACHOVIA
cc:

Subject:  FW: Computers, Speed, and Distance


Another comparison:

Since sound travels at the speed of 343 meters/second through air at 20
degrees Celsius

343 meters     3.2808 feet     1 mile        3600 seconds         767.2598
miles
----------- X  -----------  X  ---------  X  ------------   =
--------------
second         1 meter         5280 feet     1 hour
hour


56,818,181.8182 miles /hour divided by 767.2598 miles / hour =  74053.3786

Your means of transportation would have to be able to travel at 74053 times
the speed of sound ...... MACH 74053!

Later again - Frank

****

Let's put the speed of the computer into perspective for a moment by allowing ourselves to make a few simple substitutions.  We'll translate gigahertz to miles per hour, using an example from an assembly line.  Suppose you are an assembly line worker, one that picks wooden blocks off a converyour belt as they arrive.  Each block is 1 inch wide, and they are stacked on the converyour packed 12 to a foot.  Each block has an instruction to perform a specific task, which the assembly line worker will perform.  Our worker is taking the place of the computer's CPU, which fetches instructions in a serial fashion from a queue.   And to make things more exciting, lets pretend our worker's factory is small and mobile, built on railroad tracks, and moves one unit forward for every instruction processed.  This would set the speed of the instruction processing to 1 incher per second, which is equal to 0.34 MPH.

If our worker could process each instruction in exactly one second, a person could expect to process 60 * 60 * 24 (86,400) inches of instruction a day, if they worked for 24 hours straight.  Our factory would have covered the distance of xxx miles in one day. 

Now lets borrow some instruction processing speeds from the PCs in the 2.0 GHZ range, which at this time represent the middle of the road PC.  A PC can process a minimum of 1 instruction per clock cycle, and PCs today are running at 2 GHZ, or 2,000 MHZ.  How fast is this, if we increase the speed of our mobile instruction processing factory to these levels?

****

Jan 2003 : You asked how long it would take me to use up my 440 GB of drive space:

If past history is any gauge, never.   440 GB is over 240 GB more space
than all the space I've ever owned on every computer from 1983 - present.
It's an obscene amount of storage.   Know how many 1541 Drives it would
take to equal that much storage?  A lot.  Consider that each floppy for the
1541 held 170,000 bytes of data:

440,000,000,000 / 170,000 = 2,588,235

Or, 2.5 million 1571 drives, all plugged in and on-line at the same time to
equal what I've got in one PC.  Funny thing is, I actually paid more for
the 1571 drive than I did this last hard drive.

Now let's have some real fun.  Suppose each drive was only 2" tall.  This
many drives stacked up would be 5 million inches, or 431,372 feet, or 84
miles high.  The space shuttle orbits at 220 miles.

My 440 GB is provided by 3 hard drives in a RAID 0, or "stripping"
configuration.  It's the fastest IDE method available for PCs, it loads
everything nearly instantly.  I copied a 180 MB file to it last night in
less than 1 second.   Acutally only 2 of the 120 GB drives are in a RAID 0,
the other 200 GB drive is a stand-alone IDE that holds the OS.

******