In 1962 there were on this planet about 55,000 scientific journals publishing about 1,200,000 articles per year;
Question:
In 1962 there were on this planet about 55,000 scientific journals publishing about 1,200,000 articles per year; there were also 60,000 scientific books and 100,000 other research reports issued per year (in the United States, scientific and technical publications have doubled in bulk approximately every 20 years since 1800). Estimate the size, in bits, of a computer memory capable of storing
(a) all scientific publications produced in 1962, and
(b) all scientific publications produced as of the present.
Assume
30 pages per article
300 pages per book
100 pages per research report
60 lines of print per page
70 symbols per line
and assume each symbol can be any of 128 different characters. How fast must one add to such a memory, to keep it up to date?
Dragon maze. (Courtesy of D. Ingalls, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.)
Step by Step Answer:
To keep such a memory up to date we would need to know the rate of new publications per year If we a...View the full answer
