[speedgibson] Speed Gibson: Orders of Magnitude

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Posted by Speed Gibson:
Orders of Magnitude
http://speedgibson.powerblogs.com/posts/1234279402.shtml


   The first computer I ever worked with had cycle times measured in
   micro-minutes. Adding two numbers took 10 micro-minutes, or maybe 1.6
   "kops" - kilo operations per second. I'll spare you the size, power,
   and cooling requirements required to do that.
   Soon after, we were talking microseconds, then nanoseconds a decade
   later. Storage went from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes to
   terabytes, and whatever follows that.
   Government budgets have done much the same. I remember the
   announcement that the state budget had reached $1 billion. I remember
   when Federal spending was a $100 billion or so. In those days, a
   billion dollars was an impressive sum, "real money" as the late
   Senator Dirkson called it.
   Now we casually speak of trillions of dollars and nobody's heart skips
   a beat. Printing and spending another trillion dollars or two is
   discussed almost casually by many. Ironically, there is no fear now
   when we need that fear the most. Locally, the DFL could not be
   bothered with the time-honored traditional 3 percent bonding guideline
   last year. No fear.
   What comes after a trillion? As Mark Steyn observed, when they asked
   Senate hopeful Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, she said a cotillion.