This could well be because of the confusion between standard and computer-related use of “kilo-” and “mega-”. For instance, in computer parlance, “kilo-” refers to 1024, whereas normally it means 1000. Unfortunately, the marketing people in the companies that produce storage media have figured out that they can artificially inflate the size of their disks by using whichever definition of “kilo-” or “mega-” suits their purposes.
For instance, a so-called 1.44 MB floppy disk does not have 1024 x 1024 x 1.44 = 1509949.44 bytes of storage, as we might be led to believe. The very fact that we end up with a fractional number of bytes should clue you in to the fact that the 1.44 MB claim is bogus! Those high-density disks in fact have an unformatted capacity of 1,474,560 bytes (512 bytes/sector x 18 sectors/track x 80 tracks/side x 2 sides/disk), or exactly 1440 KB. Dividing this number by 1024, we get a total disk size of 1.40625 MB. The astute reader will see where the discrepancy lies: the marketing people have taken the correct disk size in kilobytes and divided this figure by the standard 1000 instead of the proper 1024. It therefore looks like you’re getting an extra 40 KB of space.
To make things more difficult, the formatted capacity of a disk is not the same as the unformatted capacity. In order to use a blank disk, you need to format it for a particular file system. This uses up a portion of the available space with file tables, error-correcting features, volume labels, partition tables, and miscellaneous other stuff. For a 1440 KB disk formatted with the FAT16 file system (typical for most DOS and Windows machines), you will end up with a usable capacity of about 1,457,664 bytes, or 1.39 MB.
Hard drive manufacturers pull this trick as well. A 10.0 GB hard drive is actually a 9.3 GB hard drive. Of course, the formatted capacity will be even lower.
>> In a computer text book that I had (I think around 1993) the authors made a claim that all the books ever printed could fit on one CD with a diameter (IIRC) of 7 feet.
A CD-ROM with a diameter of 7’ would hold about 239000 MB, equivalent to about 368 standard CD-ROMS, or 60 million pages of ASCII text. This does not even begin to make a dent in the total that is published yearly, much less that was ever published. And we are not talking about the illustrations, photos etc. As I said, 31 CD-ROMS hold about 1300 issues of National Geographic Magazine. Get real, the NG is only an infinitesimal part of what is published in the world. Any important daily newspaper publishes more in a day than the NG magazine carries in a month.
My verdict in a nutshell: the OP is total bunk worthy of snopes (has anybody checked?)
I was just thinking about the Library of Congress myself. According to their Fascinating Facts, the LOC has more than 18 million books. Using 200 pages per book (probably very low), that’s 3.6 billion (or 3,600,000,000 for you non-Americans) pages. Given that the LOC holdings only cover a fractions of all the books ever published, you’re already starting to get pretty high up there for number of pages.
Another fact from the LOC: their holdings include 54 million “manuscripts.”
Too bad the mebi/kibi/gibi/tebi/etc. prefixes probably won’t gain popularity. If they did, you wouldn’t see [sub]Drive capacity 10GB when 1GB=1 billion bytes[/sub] on so many ads.