Life Of A Byte

Hi, my name is Brontobyte and this is my story of how I grew up from a Byte, to Megabyte, to Gigabyte, to Brontobyte. I was born possibly in 1956 to unknown parents at an undisclosed place. All I know about my birth is that my Godfather Mr. Werner Buchholz from IBM gave me my name ‘Byte’ in July of 1956. I was told that Mr. Buchholz named me Byte (instead of bite) so I won’t be lost with all those bits and I am so thankful to him for making me feel special. So I am assuming that I was born somewhere around that time which would make me about 61 years old.

I am not bragging about myself but I am very special and I’ll prove to you in this short biography. I am very gifted from three different angles. One is that I got new names as I kept growing. For example, I was named Kilobyte, and them Megabyte etc. and later in this autobiography, I’ll tell you about all my names. And the second reason I am special is that I have been growing exponentially since I was born. Most of you probably grow until you are about 18 years or so and stop growing physically. Not me! Lastly, I am told that I helped significantly to the growth of some revolutionary technologies like personal computer, internet, and now big data. Pardon me if you think I am taking too much credit for big data but I am only sharing with you what I have been told. Let me give some more details about my specialties.

Just check this Infographic to find out all the names I got over the years.

Life of Byte

I was told that Yottabyte was named after ‘Yoda’, that little old guy with big ears from Star Wars. Well, I hope to live as long as he lived. You know one thing? I have no clue who gives me my names. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know how big I am now. I could be Brontobyte, or Gegobyte. If you know, can you please put in a comment below. I’ll be much obliged.

My life’s passion is to store information. I kept growing and growing as I stored more and more information. As you can see from the infographic above, I can store the entire information in the universe in my current form.

Another interesting tidbit is that I lived in many different houses over the years. Let me now tell you about the different houses I lived in over the years.

During my initial years, I lived in this ‘magnetic drum memory’ house which is humongous. I very much enjoyed that huge house.

Above left: The magnetic Drum Memory of the UNIVAC computer. 
Above right: A 16-inch-long drum from the IBM 650 computer. 
Photo courtesy of http://royal.pingdom.com

Then I moved to this smaller house called ‘hard disk drive’. Boy, life was hard then as it was noisy and that house kept getting smaller and smaller.

Above: IBM Model 350, the first-ever hard disk drive.
Photo courtesy of http://royal.pingdom.com

Above left: A 250 MB hard disk drive from 1979.
Above right:The IBM 3380 from 1980, the first GB-capacity hard disk drive.
Photo courtesy of http://royal.pingdom.com

I also moved around to other houses like ‘laser disk’, ‘floppy disk’, and ‘magnetic tape’ etc. But my current house, called ‘solid state drive’ is sooooo nice. It is small but very quiet. Even though I have grown to my current gigantic size, I can live in smaller houses. Isn’t that cool?

Authors’ note:

I took a risk in writing this article in this manner. Hope you liked it. Whether you liked it or not, please feel free to let me know either way. Connect/Follow if you want to read my future articles. Thank you.

Sources:

http://www.whatsabyte.com/

https://www.bobbemer.com/BYTE.HTM

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/9/11/how-big-is-a-petabyte-exabyte-zettabyte-or-a-yottabyte.html

http://pcbunn.cithep.caltech.edu/presentations/giod_status_sep97/tsld012.htm

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/