ELECTRONIC SPACE

Do you think we have abundant storage for information?. Let us find out.
We know 0 and 1 are called binary digit or bit. With one bit we can represent two numbers 0,1. With two bit we can represent 4 numbers.

Binary Decimal
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 2
1 1 3
With 32 bit, the maximum, positive value we can represent is 2147483647.

Those days we had only 32 bit computer system. To maintain time, the computer has to count seconds, hours and days. The old computer can count up to that above number. Than it had to start from zero.

Once, in USA air-traffic control room, the people failed to notice the computer count had reached the maximum. So they had not reversed it to zero. The time in those computers came to a stop. And the air traffic was thrown into disarray for a few hours.

Today, we have 64 bit, 128 bit computer systems. And we have fairly enough electronic space.

Now we are able to appreciate why clocks are circular? The needles can go round and round and from beginning again and again. A clever use of physical space.

The digital picture quality goes on increasing. HD - high definition. UHD - ultra high definition. Hence we require more and more electronic space or electronic memory. The smart phones RAM (Random access memory) goes on increasing. Once we measured memory in mega bytes; To day in Gigabytes; Tomorrow in tetra bytes. 300 hours of video are uploaded in youtube every minute. Imagine how much memory they require in their servers.

We created more data in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. We are now facing storage problem. The human DNA stores more efficiently than the electronic memory.

Scientists say, they can store ( if experiment is successful) . 215 petabytes of data (215 million giga bytes) in a single gram of DNA. In principle, we could store every bit of data ever created by humans in a single room. Hope we will see that day.

Think of those prehistoric days when people passed every bit of information from generation to generation only through oral communication and the storage was only their brains. We have come a long way.
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