Tuesday, March 18, 2008 - The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

Six-year olds confirm: megabyte obsolete

This afternoon I gave my Exaflood presentation to 40 six-year olds. My daughter Annie's first-grade class has been engaged in a six-week unit on "communication."

I did the history of the Internet, how the Internet works, lasers and fiber, computer languages, binary -- ones and zeroes -- all that. I taught them about bits and bytes and then asked if anyone had heard of a kilobyte.

Anyone, anyone? Nothing.

How about a megabyte? Anyone, anyone? Nope.

One more try. Does anyone know what a gigabyte is? Twenty hands shoot up in the air!

"Gigabytes are in iPods!!!!" several students shouted.

Mere megabytes are dead. Long live the Exaflood.

posted by Bret Swanson @ 7:33 PM | Innovation