Ethernet and Exabyte

Ethernet

Ethernet is the most common type of connection computers use in a LAN (local are connection). It was developed in 1976 by the Xerox Corporation in collaboration with DEC and Intel. Ethernet was introduced commercially in the 1980’s and was standardized in 1985 as the IEEE 802.3 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers project 802).

An Ethernet port resembles a regular phone jack but has slightly wider dimensions. This port can also be used to connect one computer to another computer, local network, or an external DSL or

cable modem.

Ethernet originally came in two forms, the 10BaseT and the 100BaseT, with transfer speeds of up to 10mbps and 100mbps respectively. The newer and faster “Gigabit” Ethernet connection's data transfer speeds peak at a whopping 1000mbps.

Exabyte

An Exabyte is a unit of data or information storage and is 2 to the 60th power bytes, or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes. That’s over one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) bytes. An exabyte is 1024 petabytes and precedes the zettabyte in units of computer

storage measurement. Every piece of content ever written would take up roughly 5  exabytes.

Global computing capacity has increased at a rate of about 58% every year from 1986 to 2007. The world’s technological capacity for information storage was 2.6 exabytes in 1986, which grew rapidly to 295 exabytes in 2007. 295 exabytes is equivalent to roughly 404 billion CD-ROMs, that’s almost 61 CD-ROMs per person. Piling up 404 billion CDs would easily create a stack from the earth to the moon and still have around a quarter of the pile left over. In today’s world around 2000 exabytes of information is broadcast every day.