A gigabyte of punch cards?

I just happen to have a box of cards on my desk (some guys just *never* get around to cleaning up). I took a batch and really squished them tight: this gave me 60 cards per centimeter. That means 60*100*80 = 2^8*3*5^4 = 480000 bytes/meter (I never use FORTRAN anymore :-)). So our gigabyte of data stands

1024*1024*1024/480000 = 2^(22)/(3*5^4) meters = 2^(19)/(3*5^7) km ~ 2.24 km

tall, at least without gravity to compress everything. Now who is the lucky guy who has to retrieve the top one off the stack?

Cheers, Michael

------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Doob Telephone: (204) 474-9796 Department of Mathematics Fax: (204) 474-7606 University of Manitoba email: Michael_Doob@umanitoba.ca Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2 ------------------------------------------------------------------