Posted: 2/4/2008 7:14:07 PM EDT
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I was watching Season 2 of TNG this week, and noticed (in "Measure of a Man") that Data, the android, listed his performance specs as a processing capacity of 60 trillion ops/sec, and his storage capacity as 800 quadrillion bits. When that show first aired (1988), I believe I had a 1mhz Tandy Color Computer MC-10, and would shortly be upgrading to a Tandy 1000 HX (7.16 mhz 8088, 256k, no HDD). So, at best, my storage capacity was 720k (floppy), and processing power was probably in the kiloflops. Today, 60 teraflops would put him at #15 on the November 2007 Top500 supercomputer list. 800 quadrillion bits is about 100,000 terabytes, or about 50,000 times the storage on my home network. Huge, but now at least imaginable. |
| I was always surprised when they used real terms in that episode considering one of the tech guys on the show, I think Michael Okuda coined the term kiloquad for the unit of data storage on TNG so that they wouldn't use a real world figure that would quickly end up looking for too small |