News You Can Bruise for 2010 January 20

I was watching Computer Networks: Heralds of Resource Sharing, the excellent 1972 documentary about the ARPAnet, and one statement jumped out at me: "the large superfiles, the 10¹¹-bit weather files which we're putting on the Illiac". That's about 13 gigabytes, which will fit on a couple DVDs today but which was damn impressive in 1972.

Some Moore's Law style inflation shows just how impressive: an equivalent amount of data today might be 370 petabytes. They must have had a whole tape library devoted to that weather data.