There was a time when the entirety of the internet would have fit onto the device you're currently browsing on.

beebarfbadger@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 330 points –
85

There was a time it would’ve fit on a floppy

This is really nonsensical. It could fit on a piece of paper in font size 8 if you go back far enough and "stretch" the definition of Internet.

Not true. The first document on the internet was, in fact, 7 pages in 8pt font.

It was the New Purchase brochure from a Packard Bell 286 4MHz from Circuit City transcribed into .doc format.

Yeah, but if you wrote really small on a note card you could have used the entire internet on a test!

The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.

The unmatched power of the sun, even?

There also was a time when the entirety of the human language would fit in this thread.

We have a great great great great ..... grandfather that was a single cell.

Your ellipsis is too long. It’s like dot dot dot …. it just keeps going on and on and on

2 more...

Back in like 2005 or 2006, I remember posting an article to Fark about a company that wanted to make a laptop that had the entire internet cached on it so you could browse the web offline. That was almost 20 years ago and I remember saying "they have seriously underestimated the amount of porn on the internet."

If you believe The Big Bang Theory there's a time the entirety of everything would have fit onto the device you're currently browsing on.

Not necessarily. All we know is that everything seemed to come from a single point, on a cosmic scale. However, at that scale, our entire galaxy would be considered a single point.

What we do know is that everything is expanding, and that it was homogeneous by the point that it cooled enough to cease being a plasma (and so opaque to light). It could have been a vast area that suddenly spawned matter/energy, rather than a single point.

I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn't fit on your phone, but there's plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

There is a time where the entire universe could of fit in the volume of your phone.

There may be a time in the future when the entire internet as it is now could fit on whatever people have instead of cell phones in a few hundred years.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

Doubtful. Corporations seem to have a lifespan of 150 to 200 years at most. IBM may manage to break the 150 mark, but they are already losing market share. The cracks are showing in Apple only a decade after Steve Jobs died. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple, Google, and Meta are all gone before they hit the 100 year mark, the latter two may not make it to 50

Knocking on wood that we don't nuke, fry or pollute ourselves out of the race until then.

I wonder when smartphones with a capacity of 40 zettabytes will officially come out. Then we can post this all over again.

The internet or the world wide web?

Well both technically, but at different times

I'm not so sure a single phone could have handled the internet even in infancy. You'd need at least 2. :p

Run a VM in the phone that connects to the host over an OTG cable. Boom, internet

At least 2 phones? Could be 1 phone with a big SD card then...?

But how much stuff do you think was on the nascient www? There's periods where it was literally a few dozen megabytes. Even when usenet was pretty active it wasn't much space in the scheme of things, we had servers storing everything in some few gigabytes of storage.

and it was more diverse, surprising, and engaging than what the have now.

Get rid of videos and we probably still could.

Wikipedia is ridiculously small

The Mistral language model is 3.8gb and has a crazy amount of knowledge

It lies a lot

I wouldn't say a lot. Llama2 is way worse in my experience. Mistral gives fairly factual information.

Regardless, it is still wild that 3.8gb can go so far

No it wouldn't since it wasn't made at thr time.

English not your first language? No worries, see the "would have"? That phrase signifies a hypothetical - I'll leave you to ponder what hypothetical situation could be meant in this particular case, but spoiler: it involves comparing features of things that were constructed in different time frames.

Why don't you go figure out what a shower thought is before berating this guy.

I'm not berating, I'm helping clear up some confusion about the conditionals.

This is not a shower thought

It literally was though.

That's not what this sub is for.

Just to sum up: after telling me that this shower thought is not a shower thought, you say that the shower thoughts community is not the place for shower thoughts.

...

Did you forget where you are posting? Or do you maybe have a very ... unique ... definition of what comprises

"the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. [...] thoughts that many people can relate to and [...] find something funny or interesting in regular stuff"

as per the sidebar?

It's not for literally any thought that occurs during a shower.

Right, it's for

“the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. […] thoughts that many people can relate to and […] find something funny or interesting in regular stuff”.