this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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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