Gigabits

I grew up in the computer world. Heck, my Engineering degree was not your typical "EE," it was in computer design. So I knew a thing or two about computers.

When I was first hired at Ma Bell, we had just started putting computer-controlled central telephone offices in. The piece of aluminum pictured, oh about 8" x 1 foot was one of the program memory cards. Each little square is a small magnet that was either a "one" or a "zero." You can't tell a computer much with such a memory system, so each central office had a lot of these things.  Let's say 1,000, giving the computer thee ability to recognize when one of 10,000 people went off hook, decide what to do with the number they dialed, and regularly check its own health.  Probably a one megabit (one million bit) operating system.

I have the smallest iPhone they sell. It has 16 Gigabits (16 billion bits), or in simpler terms, enough for 16,000 of the original computer-controlled telephone offices.

Small wonder abacabadabacaba (see 12/4/11) was needed.