On Apr 15, 2007, at 2:49 AM, Russell McMahon wrote:

> Those were the days.
> Fortunately, they've gone :-).
>
Just for kicks...  A mile of paper tape appears to hold about
600kbytes (10 bytes per inch, 120 bytes per foot, right?) so
about two miles for the same storage as a HD 5.25inch floppy
or 3.5 inch stiffy, or about 1000 miles of paper tape for a
CD's worth of storage.  Enough paper tape to equal the terabyte
of disk you can easily put on your compute these days would
stretch to the moon.  And back.  Three times.

Stanford's AI lab (SAIL) had a project to move all their data
from old backup tapes (7 and 9 track 1/2inch magtape) to modern
media.  It ALL (20+ years worth?) fit on a single 3.5 inch hard
drive.  And that was about a decade ago...

BillW

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