This and That: July 1
For quite a few years your editor (QDB) has been gathering items here and there in the popular media and publishing them under “This and That” on our website and also in The Numismatic Sun. With a nice supply on hand from recent months—more than we can use in the next issue of the Sun, here are some for your possible interest and amusement.
It’s not over yet: “The Westfield Whip Manufacturing Company in Westfield, Mass., produces more than 50,000 buggy whips annually.” (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Amazing: A terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, is a data storage capacity easily available on a hard drive for less than $200. Fifteen terabytes will store all of the information on the books in the Library of Congress. Now there is talk about petabytes, or 1,000 terabytes. Recently, a friend of ours from Connecticut, Bill E., reminisced about paying $4,000 a number of years ago for an early computer that had a capacity of 65 megabytes—hardly enough these days to be even worth thinking about. A couple of popular thumb drives, inexpensive and which you can carry in your pocket, can hold this much data.
