t 'n t luoma

For those of you not up on the numbers, a terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1024 gigabytes.

A megabyte = 1,024 kilobytes. 1,024 megabytes = one gigabyte.

To give a little historical context: when I was in college (1991-1995) student accounts were allocated 4 megabytes of space, which is roughly the equivalent to the full text of the Christian Bible (Old and New Testaments).

When I entered seminary (1995), a nice man by the name of Carl Edman gave me a computer which had a mind-blowing (at that time) 1 gigabyte hard drive, which was in a large external enclosure. I remember trying to guess how much the drive would have cost, and found that it was around $1,000 USD.

When I bought this laptop (2000) it came with an 11 gigabyte hard drive, which was later upgraded to a 30 gigabyte drive, for which I paid around $200, I believe.

In June 2003 I bought an iPod which has a 30 gigabyte capacity and fits easily in the palm of my hand, not much larger than my cell phone (a Treo 600, which has more RAM than the average computer had at my college). There is now a 40 gigabyte iPod which is about the same size.

What could anyone possibly need 1 terabyte of space for? Well, at the moment, few will. Then again, few needed 10 gigabytes 10 years ago, and few could have afforded it if they needed it.

I use a significant amount of diskspace for storing computer CDs such as Microsoft Office, which has an annoying tendency to ask me to put the installation disk in whenever I try to access a feature which I hadn’t used before (filters, clip art, etc). So I just copy the entire CD to c:\cd\office\ and install if from there.

Then there are the MP3s. I have a 60 gigabyte external drive where I keep my MP3s, along with a bunch of old files that I really ought to sort through, but really there is very little motivation to clean it out when the time it would take to make sure I don’t delete anything I might need later greatly outweighs the cost of getting a bigger hard drive.

This made me wonder how much space will be required by the next version of Windows (Whistler, scheduled for release in 2007).

I was talking with my friend Tam Ho about Windows diskspace requirements. He wrote that his Windows directory is already at 1.15 gigabytes after 7 days use. (Mine is at 2.5 gigabytes, less than a month after a clean install.)

Windows XP officially requires 1.5 gigabytes of space. Windows 3.1 (circa 1988) required 30 megabytes. Tam wrote:

If we assume that the space requirement of the OS doubles roughly every 3 years, that seems to fit the data. XP came out in 2002... the next version is coming out in '07... that means the next version’s space requirement will be about (1.5gigabytes)x[2^(5/3)] or 4.77 gigabytes.

You heard it here first.... but actually XP was released in 2001, so it’ll probably be closer to 6 gigabytes. I'm going to say 5.5 gigabytes, final answer, and I'm confident it'll be within 10% of that number.

So the game is on. I’m less optimistic than Tam, I think it will be closer to 7, and 10 will be the reality after a little time of actually using the system. The official requirement may be 5.5 gigabytes, but when has Microsoft’s “official” requirement ever been really usable?

Update (2004/02/20) C|Net asks: Is your PC ready for Longhorn?