What is a gig?

Used to be a rock band concert booking. Now it also refers to memory, something most old rockers have retained little of. In ancient times (10 years ago), a meg of computer memory was a big deal. Now we're talking terabytes. Here are the numbers:

Bit: One unit of data. Expressed as a 0 or 1.

Byte: Eight bits.

Kilobyte (k): 1,000 bytes, equal to a medium-sized paragraph.

Megabyte (meg): 1,000 K, equal to a small book.

Gigabyte (gig): 1,000 megs, equal to the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Terabyte (tear?): 1,000 gigs, about 300 million pages of text, enough to circle the earth three times.

Source: Minneapolis (MN) Star-Tribune, Nov. 4, 2004.