1y ago

There was a time when the entirety of the internet would have fit onto the device you're currently browsing on.

85 comments

- Got em!
- OP's mom's pussy is so big, Thanos had to snap twice.
There was a time it would’ve fit on a floppy
- This is really nonsensical. It could fit on a piece of paper in font size 8 if you go back far enough and "stretch" the definition of Internet.
  
  Not true. The first document on the internet was, in fact, 7 pages in 8pt font.
  It was the New Purchase brochure from a Packard Bell 286 4MHz from Circuit City transcribed into .doc format.
Anyone remember that offline Wikipedia reader that had the whole text of English wiki on it? I always thought it was neat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
- You can still download an archive of Wikipedia today, and it's smaller than you'd expect
  
  How big do I expect it to be?
  
  I downloaded one recently for when I was going to be offline for a whole week. It worked amazingly well!
- No, but i do remember Microsoft Encarta 98
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Microsoft Encarta 98
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Nowadays there's Kiwix
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1lRI35gKSPA
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://m.piped.video/watch?v=1lRI35gKSPA
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
- The power of Sun Microsystems in the palm of my hand
  
  Unix noises
  
  drinks a cup of Java
- The unmatched power of the sun, even?
There also was a time when the entirety of the human language would fit in this thread.
- grunts approval
  
  grunts dismissive mocking
- We have a great great great great ..... grandfather that was a single cell.
  
  Your ellipsis is too long. It’s like dot dot dot …. it just keeps going on and on and on
Back in like 2005 or 2006, I remember posting an article to Fark about a company that wanted to make a laptop that had the entire internet cached on it so you could browse the web offline. That was almost 20 years ago and I remember saying "they have seriously underestimated the amount of porn on the internet."
- Instructions unclear, universe exploded my phone when I tried to fit it inside
  
  Now that's gonna be one spicy pillow
- What if I don't believe it?
  
  If your lack of belief in it changed the actual reality of things, I'm pretty sure that'd make you God.
- Not necessarily. All we know is that everything seemed to come from a single point, on a cosmic scale. However, at that scale, our entire galaxy would be considered a single point.
  What we do know is that everything is expanding, and that it was homogeneous by the point that it cooled enough to cease being a plasma (and so opaque to light). It could have been a vast area that suddenly spawned matter/energy, rather than a single point.
- And they still recommended two 256mb sticks instead of one 512...
The entirety of the internet on my toilet.
I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn't fit on your phone, but there's plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.
- ✋
There is a time where the entire universe could of fit in the volume of your phone.
One single html page? I guess, yes.
- It's one html page Michael. How big could it be? 10 gigabytes?
- And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.
  
  Doubtful. Corporations seem to have a lifespan of 150 to 200 years at most. IBM may manage to break the 150 mark, but they are already losing market share. The cracks are showing in Apple only a decade after Steve Jobs died. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple, Google, and Meta are all gone before they hit the 100 year mark, the latter two may not make it to 50
- Knocking on wood that we don't nuke, fry or pollute ourselves out of the race until then.
I wonder when smartphones with a capacity of 40 zettabytes will officially come out. Then we can post this all over again.
The internet or the world wide web?
- Well both technically, but at different times
  
  I'm not so sure a single phone could have handled the internet even in infancy. You'd need at least 2. :p
and it was more diverse, surprising, and engaging than what the have now.
🤯
Get rid of videos and we probably still could.
Wikipedia is ridiculously small
No it wouldn't since it wasn't made at thr time.
- English not your first language? No worries, see the "would have"? That phrase signifies a hypothetical - I'll leave you to ponder what hypothetical situation could be meant in this particular case, but spoiler: it involves comparing features of things that were constructed in different time frames.
  
  Why don't you go figure out what a shower thought is before berating this guy.
  
  No it doesn't
That's just the intermediate value theorem.
If we define the size of the Internet as a continuous function, and it started at zero and currently doesn't fit in your phone then yeah, no shit, at some point it fit in your phone.
If it's truly continuous there was an exact point where it would exactly fill up your phone with no room left over.
The Mistral language model is 3.8gb and has a crazy amount of knowledge
- I wouldn't say a lot. Llama2 is way worse in my experience. Mistral gives fairly factual information.
  Regardless, it is still wild that 3.8gb can go so far
  
  Then it will pass better on Turing test.
  It's a feature.
This is not a shower thought
- It literally was though.
  
  That's not what this sub is for.

85 comments