Description
This article is from the Star Trek Tech
FAQ, by Joshua Bell inexorabletash@hotmail.com with numerous
contributions by others.
31 "How big is a kiloquad?" (Holodeck and Computers - Star Trek)
This hasn't been answered, and in the Encyclopedia, it says:
No, we don't know how many bytes are in a kiloquad. We don't even
want to know. The reason the term was invented was specifically to
avoid describing the data capacity of Star Trek's computers in
20th-century terms. It was feared ... that any such attempt would
look foolish in just a few years, given the current rate of
progress in that field.
However, many r.a.st.tech contributors have converged on kiloquad to
mean 1000 (kilo) * 1 quadrillion bytes (or bits, but we'll stick with
bytes for the explanation), the premise being that the phrase "quad"
came into use instead of "pet" for Petabyte, since that sounds dumb.
Then the kilo-, Mega- and Giga- prefixes were recycled.
Depending on where you live, a quadrillion is either 10^15 (American
definition) or 10^24 (European definition). If Americans came up with
this definition, that makes a kiloquad 10^18 bytes, which is around
2^60 bytes, which is about a billion gigabytes. If a European came up
with this definition, we're talking about 2^90 bytes, which is a
trillion gigabytes. Either way, we're talking a lot of bits.
Is this technologically feasible, given that an isolinear chip, quoted
at 2.15 kiloquad in the TNG TM is about the size of a microscope
slide?
From H. Peter Anvin:
...The 2.15 kqd isolinear chips [would have] a bit density of
2.94e+15 bits/mm^3 (I have assumed the dimensions to be 90x30x2.5
mm, this is probably on the high side if you exclude the part where
you handle the chip); that means each bit could form a cube 7.0 nm
(70 [angstrom]) to the side. The chips are optical, which I assume
means they are read and written with electromagnetic radiation that
behaves somewhat approximately like light. 7 nm is in the far
ultraviolet region-near X-ray region (visible light ends at about
200 nm) which is really pushing the limit. Assuming some form of
multi-state encoding that may exist may push this down to near UV
which would then be a bit more practical to deal with, and more
"optical", but that is irrelevant.
Hence, what we "know" about ST computer technology seems to
correlate pretty well to the definition 1 quad = 1 quadrillion
[American] bytes. It may be bits or bytes (it is only a factor of
8, obviously... it changes 7 nm to 14 nm if it is bits not bytes),
but it seems to fit pretty well.
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