Excita bytes!  Xtreeeeem Bytes!

An exabyte is one-quintillion byte unit of information.  That is equivalent to 50,000 times the size of the Library of Congress.

The amount of data that is flying around the Internet right now is measured in that scale.  This opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out a bunch of fascinating statistics, this one caught my eye.

Cisco's newest video-conferencing system requires 15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes, which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75 of these Cisco conference calls would equal the entire Internet traffic of the year 1990.

...75 video conference calls == the entire Internet traffic of 1990.  Admittedly there weren't a whole lotta people on the Internet for that time, but still..75 calls.  My previous company did that many video conference calls by themselves in a month, maybe in as short a time frame as a week...and that was a company of about 200. 

It's not stopping here folks, you realize that don't you?  There are 1 Billion people connected...there are 5 Billion people not connected....even a simple arithmetic operation is staggering let alone an exponential one.

We have not idea what we will be using computers for and how integrated they will be in our lives in 10 years...heck 5 years may be too long.

Are you ready for the ride?