Ade’s Notes

If you feel inadequate about your hard drive size, a well-known Swiss (or German, for the pedants among us) electronics supermarket sells Terrabyte (sic) sized harddrives. Now… Terra (with two “r”s) usually refers to earth. So… is that a harddrive the size of the whole planet? Would be useful for Marvin the paranoid Android: “Here I am, harddrive the size of a planet…”

Of course, I couldn’t leave this post without looking up where the prefix “tera” as in 10¹² (or in this case 2⁴⁰) actually comes from. Here’s what the second oracle told me:

Confirmed in 1960, it comes from the Greek τερασ, meaning monster.^*

I therefore suggest we call it a Monsterbyte from now on!