Did You Know?

A video making the rounds puts today's increases in technology into a certain perspective. Originally written as a Powerpoint presentation for teachers to help them put the pace of advancement in information management technologies into perspectives, the video really helps you envision just how quickly things are evolving.

The version I've linked to runs about seven minutes and the story behind the video is almost as interesting as the video itself.

At one point in the video, it helps to understand the powers of ten. You have probably heard of kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes in the context of computer file sizes. Terabytes follow gigabytes and one terabyte (arguably) equals 1,000 gigabytes. Petabytes follow terabytes and are themselves followed by exabytes. An exabyte equals (arguably) roughly, a million terabytes.

To put an exabyte in context, it's said that two exabytes of data were generated in 1999. It's also said that the total number of words ever spoken by humans equals five exabytes...and, yes, that's counting auctioneers and gossip columnists.

Information is growing exponentially and the world available to our children's children will be, in some ways, very different than the one we live in.

Photo credit: Karl Fisch