[jonathanleane]

There was a truly terrible Keanu Reaves movie released in the mid 90's, Johnny Mnemonic (which I just learned was based on a William Gibson book of the same name).

I haven't watched the movie in 25 years, but from memory the premise is that corporations use human brains as organic/wetware hard drives to transfer information because hardware-only storage has largely maxed out or would be too cumbersome for information smuggling.

In the movie, the base storage capacity of the human brain is said to be 80gb, though the protagonist is able to increase his storage capacity to 320gb by using a cybernetic implant and agreeing to dump a bunch of his childhood memories to make extra room.

This seemed like a ludicrous amount of data to 10 year old me. Our recently purchased top of the line 486 had a 400MB hard drive, so the amount of data stored in Keanu's head was nearly 3 orders of magnitude more.

Exponential growth is a hell of thing.

[geocrasher]

How ironic is it that a movie expressly about memory storage could be so forgettable!

Where's your song about that, Alanis Morrissette?

[sp332]

Gibson said later that 80 GB would obviously have been too small to be really impressive, but no one called it out. https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/13396882971660...

[bombcar]

Part of the problem is likely nobody would understand what “terabyte” was an petabyte would have just sounded wrong