Glen Ditchfield wrote:
How big would a gigabyte of punched cards be?
1 gigabyte.
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According to Glen Ditchfield:
How big would a gigabyte of punched cards be?
Well, 2^30/80 is 13,421,773 cards. Anyone remember how many cards fit in one of those big flat boxes they came in? If it was 5000, it would take 2,685 of these boxes to store a gig. What weight and volume that would occupy, I couldn't say at this point. Trouble with us old timers is our memory starts to fail. :-P Anyone still have one of those big flat boxes of cards?
According to me:
According to Glen Ditchfield:
How big would a gigabyte of punched cards be?
Well, 2^30/80 is 13,421,773 cards. Anyone remember how many cards fit in one of those big flat boxes they came in? If it was 5000, it would take 2,685 of these boxes to store a gig. What weight and volume that would occupy, I couldn't say at this point. Trouble with us old timers is our memory starts to fail. :-P Anyone still have one of those big flat boxes of cards?
Another problem with us old timers is it takes a while to adjust our habits. Just did a Google search...
"The overall dimensions of punched cards used for data processing have remained the same since Herman Hollerith invented the medium: 7 3/8 inches wide by 3 1/4 inches high by .007 inches thick. Today, these dimensions are set by the EIA standard RS-292 media 1 punched card. This standard is augmented by ANSI X3.21-1967 governing the holes in the card and ANSI X3.26-1980 governing the use of the Hollerith code to encode alphanumeric data on cards."
(from http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html)
They came in boxes of 2000, i.e. 6,711 boxes/gig, or 48.25 cubic yards of cards, at a cost of over $28,000 US (1996 prices). I'd roughly guesstimate the weight at 35-40 tonnes. Doesn't compare too favourably to DVDs, does it?
Assuming fully used cards (80 columns with 1 char/column) and 2000 cards per box where each box is 18"x8"x3.5". You would need (1024*1024*1024)/(80*2000)=6,710.8864 boxes. Given the volume of a box as 504 cubic inches, that would be 3,382,286.7456 cubic inches in total. 1,957.34187 cubic feet. Assuming 8 foot walls, this would be enough to almost fill a 16 foot by 16 foot room floor to ceiling.
Unless my calculations are off, of course (which is possible since I'm a systems guy!) :->
Peter
According to Glen Ditchfield:
How big would a gigabyte of punched cards be? _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
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