[microtonal]

This is a pretty old pattern (meme?). E.g. also used way back (2004) to what it would take to fill a ZFS storage pool at its maximum size:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170802160910/https://blogs.ora...

[kragen]

Calculating how much work a brute-force attack on a cryptosystem would take goes back to the 01970s if not before.