photo by: psd
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has an exhibit titled Net World that is sponsored by AT&T. What makes this exhibit unique is the use of RFID tags which can be used to create your personal avatar that follows you through the entire exhibit. Cool, huh? It would have been if the exhibit was not experiencing technical difficulties and require an extra $1.00 to purchase the RFID tag. Luckily, there was tons of information about the origin and evolution of the Internet from the early days of ARPANET to its current iteration. There were also several teaching outposts that used a tactile approach to difficult subjects such as bandwidth and routing.
I found the wall graphic placed as a fleeting blip at the end of the exhibit to be the most powerful. Its purpose was to explain the relative size of different storage media and other volumes such as the works contained in the Library of Congress. The chart started off with the small bit, ballooned past the floppy/cd/dvd, flipped past the Library of Congress collection, and ended with language. It would take a staggering 5 exabytes of storage space to catalog all known words from all of the known languages of the world!
| 8 bits |
1 byte |
|
| 1,024 bytes |
1 kilobyte (kb) |
|
| 1,024 kilobytes |
1 megabyte (mb) |
|
| 1,024 megabytes |
1 gigabyte (gb) |
|
| 1,024 gigabytes |
1 terabyte (tb) |
|
| 1,024 terabytes |
1 petabyte (pb) |
|
| 1,024 petabytes |
1 exabyte (eb) |
Related Links: History of the Internet Wiki
