JOHAN STEYN: Welcome to the Zettabyte Era
The starting date is either 2016, when the global IP traffic exceeded one zettabyte, or 2012 when the amount of digital data exceeded a zettabyte
We were waiting for the arrival with great anticipation. Once the courier handed over the package we rushed back to the warehouse, eager to lay our hands on it. I started my career building personal computers and managing the logistics for a computer distributor. Back then, the standard-size hard drives we installed in computers was 20MB (megabytes). But that day, based on a unique client order (and at great expense) we opened a box to the future. In my hands was a 1GB (gigabyte) hard drive. It was big and heavy and the crowd around us almost bowed in reverence.
That evening I had to send a picture of this alien technology to a friend. I connected my digital camera to my computer, uploaded the picture, and waited patiently for my dial-up modem to connect. The file size was 2MB and I waited several minutes for the data to upload before the email was sent. ..
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