this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
97 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43520 readers
2225 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm always amazed how little space it takes to store huge amounts of plain text. Especially when it's compressed. That old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is off by a few orders of magnitude.
I remember when CDROMs were first introduced, and available on computers. The advertising blurb was, "able to fit the ENTIRE Encyclopaedia Britanica on ONE disk!" I'll admit, I was pretty impressed, but this was before I had any idea about how information dense the written word is compared to other media.
People used to like to say a picture is worth a thousand words. You can't have much of a picture in 5kB.
I remember being little and adding a 10mb hdd to my first PC and my dad saying "who could ever use all this space??"
You could put the full text from the entire English Wikipedia on a few DVDs