What is an exabyte?

I know of:

byte
kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte

But what is a exabyte. I saw the term on a computer website. And what could possibly use/need/have that much of anything.

I'm assuming it's bigger than tera.

Oh thanks for that. So it goes:

kilobyte (kB)
megabyte (MB)
gigabyte (GB)
terabyte (TB)
petabyte (PB)
exabyte (EB)
zettabyte (ZB)
yottabyte (YB)

I wonder what the world will be like when ZB's or YB's become common use. Still they are one freakin huge number.

In the 30 or so years since I first had a computer to play with, we've gone from kilobytes of memory to gigabytes of memory and storage has gone from megabytes to terabytes. It's not hard to imagine that in my lifetime I'll buy a computer that comes with a petabyte of memory and a few exabytes of storage.

This is assuming we're not all dead of cancer from the overwhelming volume of radio waves pulsing through the air delivering all that data wirelessly to the world.

We could always go the Ted Stevens route and build an intricate network of underground tubes...

to put this in perspective, 1 Exabyte = 1,000,000,000 Gigabytes

I can see processor speeds going way up, because currently, our processors are darn slow if you think of it. We have to wait hours to encode a single video for our ipod? So there's where you'll see most progress.

Not so much RAM, I say, though. The curve is a slowing one , at some point, the common consumer will ned only a certain maximum of ram to run his consumer apps. Also, storage will increase only because people will go digital with their media libraries, so all a normal person will need is the space to sotre all his photos (tens of thousands then), a couple of hundred movies, and his music (varies from 5GB to 100GB - whatever this is a very flexible space).

But I don't see the data of one single video file going up a huge load - at some point human eyes won't notice resolution improvements anymore...

I do very much see our internet speeds going up, up, up. That's another "slow" thing.

I picture myself downloading Gigabytes in minutes. Boy.

I have to disagree with you on the RAM thing, yogi. There was a time when people would never believe an OS requiring 1G of RAM ... but both Vista and OS X pretty much need 1G whether they say so or not. Applications, operating systems, and data will always expand to fill whatever resources are made available.

As for storage, an HDTV signal is already significantly more data than a standard resolution signal; and HDTV isn't nearly the resolution a lot of computer monitors operate at. Same will be true of music; 128-bit sound will give way to 192-bit will give way to who-knows-what.

I do agree that digital media will be the driving force behind both processor and storage increases. The processor thing will be interesting ... a year or so ago we seemed to hit a wall around 3.5 GHz and suddenly everyone went to multi-core rather than pushing the speeds faster. When the dual core chips hit 3.5 GHz (+/-) will they keep going or will quad core chips arrive?

my guess is that consumer computers will end at qaud and workstations will end at 8. Then AMD and Intel will resume the Ghz war again, until they get around 5 ghz.

This just for the next 5-6 years or so.