When ever i get into a conversation with someone who is computer illiterate and i try to show them how storage technology has advanced, a typical example i like to use is telling them how many copies of the encyclopedia could fit on whatever storage medium we're talking about.
But does anyone have a relatively accurate estimate of how big the encyclopedia Britannica would be in terms of megabytes? One page i found someone suggested you could fit 1000 copies into a terrabyte, but it seems unlikely to me that the EB a 1000 megs in size. I'm sure the only version probably takes up more room since i'm guessing it has more pictures, plus video and audio clips. But i'm talking about the good 'ol fashioned printed version.
Something else i saw said the EB has about 40 or 50 million words. Figure on average word is 10 bytes, so that would be 500 megs, plus a few more for whatever illustrations are included.
And that doesn't take into account any sort of compression. For the text i'm sure you could cut the size in half at least.
So would say 250megs be an accurate estimate of the byte size of the printed version with text compression?
