Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT's BIG 3.5" mistake.
Message-ID: <5772@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 27 Oct 88 19:55:00 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 33

In article <344@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>In article <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu>, rg20+@andrew.cmu.edu (Rick
>Francis Golembiewski) writes:
>>  (I don't know anyone really needs more then
>> 500MEGS of storage for personal usage)
>Just look at all the
>paper piled around you. A few filing cabinets add up to ~1 GB, and a 
>sizable library runs into the terabyte range.

Say what?  That's so if you store it all as bitmaps, but that's a
pretty dumb way to store most books.  Let's say the average book has
50,000 words.  I've usually found average bytes per word to be 6.5
to 7 bytes, so let's be conservative and say 8.  That leads to 400,000
bytes per book.  (And note I'm not bringing in Huffmann coding.)  A
sizable library is a few thousand books; let's say ten thousand.  That
leaves us with four billion bytes of storage for a very sizable
library.  Nowhere near the terrabyte range.  Now, if you're talking
about a public library, you can reach that range, but not with a
professional or personal library.

I'll grant that I've omitted graphics and index costs, but I doubt
those would more than overbalance the omission of Huffmann encoding in
the estimate above.  Even if they raised the estimate an order of
magnitude (take two, they're small) we would still be way short of a
terrabyte.

And according to this estimate, a Next disk will hold 671 books at 256M.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"What's bad? What's the use of turning?
 In Hell I'll be there a-burning!
 Meanwhile, think of what I'm earning!
 All on account of my name." - Bill Sykes, "Oliver"