Websites that were once just 50 kilobytes of text and tiny pictures now come with music, video and animated graphics.
Compared with text, pictures really were the equivalent of 1,000 words, at least when it came to the time taken to transmit them.When your correspondent hand-coded The Economist's first website back in 1994, a typical web page was about 50 kilobytes in size and dial-up modems could transfer no more than three kilobytes a second.
But even at three miles (5km) from the local telephone exchange, the speed of his broadband connection has inched up over the past few years from 65 kilobytes a second to more than 90 kilobytes a second as the local line has been tweaked and legacy equipment like echo-cancelling coils removed from its junction boxes.Sure, he could get 650 kilobytes a second or more from a cable connection.
Being based on rules, not a dictionary, it occupies only three kilobytes of memory; T9 needs as much as 100 kilobytes.
He and his team have managed to set a record (739.3 kilobytes) for the amount of unique information encoded.
These will probably be knocked onto 2.5G GPRS or EDGE networks (with speeds of roughly 50 kilobytes per second and up to 200 kilobytes per second, respectively) that AT&T will maintain for the foreseeable future.
And since mobile phones typically have only 2,048 kilobytes of memory, this leaves more room for games and other features.
This would have made downloading images taken by Voyager 2's camera, each of which is 640 kilobytes (around five megabits) in size, slow and painful.
Sinclair owners viewed the 32 kilobytes of the BBC Micro or the 64 kilobytes of a Commodore 64 as unimaginable luxury.
With the majority of users relying in those days on dial-up modems, each web page could therefore offer no more than 50 kilobytes or so of content.
Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data.
