brontobyte
Sep. 2nd, 2015 07:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordbrontobyte (BRON-toh-bait) - n., 290 or 1027 bytes of computer storage.
Which it is depends on the type of storage, of course: virtual memory is (usually) counted in units of 1024 (210) while disc storage is (usually) in units of 1000. This is another in the series of larger numbers that starts with kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and continues with terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes, brontobytes, and (recently coined) geopbytes. While many of those are standard international scientific vocabulary for powers of 10, the largest are not: this one was coined apparently from the very large dinosaur brontosaurus (currently and still controversially renamed apatosaurus), from brontos, thunder, in ancient Greek.
---L.
Which it is depends on the type of storage, of course: virtual memory is (usually) counted in units of 1024 (210) while disc storage is (usually) in units of 1000. This is another in the series of larger numbers that starts with kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and continues with terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes, brontobytes, and (recently coined) geopbytes. While many of those are standard international scientific vocabulary for powers of 10, the largest are not: this one was coined apparently from the very large dinosaur brontosaurus (currently and still controversially renamed apatosaurus), from brontos, thunder, in ancient Greek.
---L.
