Ofoto adds 5 terabytes of storage every week. They’ll have a petabyte (1 Pb = 1,000 terabytes = 1,000,000 gigabytes) of storage soon. So will the Internet Archive. That’s an incredible amount of data!

Even more incredible: within 20 or 30 years your common desktop PC will come with a hard disk that size… and big archives like these will have smashed through the exabyte range and be up in the yottabytes. One yottabyte is 9,671,406,556,917,033,397,649,408 bits.

This prediction is not insane: my first computer, about 24 years ago, had 1 Kb, about 8,000 bits, of RAM. A new computer today has 1 Gb — a million fold increase. You get about a thousand fold increase in RAM size, hard disk size, and CPU speed almost every 10 years.