Imagine if the world is uniformly measured by bits of info instead of the conventional metric/English system. It would be probably hard to quantify the information we are passing around everyday. I came across this video in YouTube entitled, “Information Overload,” which asks the viewers if they know the certain day-to-day facts on information. Examples are:

• Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million: Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years; and lastly, Facebook, in just 2 years!
• There are about 540,000 words in the English language, which is about 5 times as many words as during Shakespeare’s time
• The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years, which means that for students starting a 4-year technical degree course, half of what they learned in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year in college
• By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain

The video was filled with other surprising information, like the aforementioned stuff. After watching this, I wondered about something - how much information can be stored at home in terms of gigabytes, or GB? Let’s start with a simple inventory of digital devices. In our household, there are: 2 laptops - 500 GB (250 GB each), 1 laptop - 80 GB , 1 external hard drive - 80 GB, 1 iPod Nano - 4 GB, 1 iPod touch - 32 GB, 2 mobile phones - 4 GB (2 GB memory card each), 3 flash drives totaling around 10 GB of disk space, some other small packets of disk spaces (i.e., SD cards, CDs, DVDs, etc), totaling around 30 GB. All in all, I have around 1,000 GB, or 1 terabytes (TB) of space, and I think 50% of it is used right now. In the coming years, as we purchase more and more devices that increase our disk storage, I think we will be measuring assets in terms of gigabytes.

How about you, how much GB do you have at home?