Computer data storage breakthrough. And new trivia question and answer. What is a yottabyte? One trillion terabytes, or 1 trillion trillion bytes. They're talking about storing a lot of data, folks.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20000305_846.html

Mega Data

Mousie

-- Mousie (mousie@mymousehole.moc), March 05, 2000

Answers

Pretty impressive! I think if you combine that much data with an equivalent breakthrough in bandwidth and processing power, you'll have a hardware platform potentially capable of being as intelligent as Hawk.

We've had software that intelligent for at least a decade.

More seriously, this article draws a distinction between capacity and bandwidth that I consider misleading. The capability to store yottabytes is something we already have. Just fill Carlsbad Caverns with CD-ROMs. The issue is being able to *retrieve* data within a useful period of time. This requires very high storage densities and suitable access methods. Remember those first encyclopedias you could get on CD-ROM? WOW, 600MB of data. Just ask for anything and wait. And wait some more.

Now imagine a yottabyte or three. Without comparable access technology, this is very cold storage. It'll be very interesting to see how this issue gets handled.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 05, 2000.