Weekly Classic Computer Trivia Question (20141205)

If my arithmetic is still correct, all of the effective capacities of the DECtape usage were less than 300,000 bytes. Please correct me if I am wrong. And regardless of all of the questions AND INTERPRETATIONS of the actual capacity of a one terabyte drive, the final capacity of a such a drive after a Low Level Format would be over 3 million tapes or the same answer I gave last time. Since the TU-55 tape has only about 13% more capacity than a TU-58 tape, that answer was expected. Note that I assume ABOUT 25% reduction in capacity between the unformatted and formatted drive. So again, it seems likely (probably more so for DECtape) that DEC produced less than 3 million tapes which means that Tony Duell's answer is correct. As for all the chatter that I seemed to have produced over terabyte = 2 ** 40 and terabyte = 10 ** 12 at least I defined my assumption and everyone knew the standard being used. As for the reason for the different standards, even they are a trivial aspect of the marketing lies which are often used to hype and market hardware and software. So I suggest that we all just accept that both of the standards are valid as long as they are clearly defined since at present memory and hard drives seem to use different definitions that have been accepted for a number of years. I would point out that one reason that memory may have stayed with 2 ** 30 is that memory is usually produced and sold in multiples of 2 ** 30 these days whereas hard drives are all over the map and almost never such a simple multiple. Please don't use the previous paragraph to start the conflict all over again. Jerome Fine