What’s a few zeros between friends?

May 20, 2009 · Posted in Computers and Humour, The domestic scene

One of the many ways that Britain has become more Americanised is in the definition and use of numerical terminology. When I was in school I was taught that a billion was one million million. The American billion, however, has always been a lot less - a mere one thousand million. I won’t bore you with the details, (you can look it up if you’re really interested), but it’s all to do with whether you adopt the ‘long scale’ or the ’short scale’. Britain used the short scale and America used the long scale.

All I can say is that, at some point in my life and I can’t remember exactly when, I became extremely confused. This was during the transition in Britain from the short scale to the long scale . I say transition, because it must have been a gradual process. I don’t recall an Act of Parliament being passed, or mass hysteria breaking out as some major Government announcement declared the change. Just to make it clear, it means that a million million is now officially called one trillion - over here and over there!

In the world of computing there has never been such ambivalence in terminology, thank goodness, or we’d all be in a right mess. Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes are the same the whole world over. A terabyte, if you didn’t know, is a trillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000).

In January 2007 Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced the arrival of the first 1-terabyte hard disk drive. (Here we go again. It used to be spelt “disc” in GB!). A slight increase from the early 1990s when I bought my first PC. This had a “massive” 10 megabyte hard disk, and (I think) about 2 megabytes of internal memory. What’s worse is that this piece of kit set me back about £1200 (+VAT).

Which is all very well, you say, but what’s all this got to do with today’s cartoon? Well, it was very frustrating for a chap to be working with a computer having so little power, and prohibitively expensive to upgrade.

But necessity is so often the mother of invention…………….

extra memory