[534] in magellan
How much Information Report from Berkeley
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Fri Oct 20 15:25:54 2000
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Message-Id: <v04020a09b6164c1f44ac@[18.18.1.143]>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 15:25:44 -0400
To: itlt@mit.edu, magellan@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
I thought you might be interested in this report from UC Berkeley - How
much Information is there? Many of you know one of the researchers, Peter
Lyman.
Here's the abstract:
> The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per
>year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on
>earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents
>of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far
>the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly
>growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic
>storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage.
Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley
School of Information Management and Systems have been working on a
project trying to establish measures of how much information exists.
This work was very recently released and got coverage in USA Today
this morning (10/19).
See http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info
There's a press release at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/events/news/how-much-info.html
