[TeMPOraL]

You and 'jerf make a fair point. Assuming you both are right, let's take jerf's estimate (which I now feel is right):

> 50MB feels like "all the 'ancient' text we have" maybe, as measured by the size of the original content and not counting copies

and yours - counting up court documents, newspapers, encyclopaedias, and I guess I'd add various letters to it (quite a lot survived to this day), and science[0], let's give it 1000x my estimate, so 50GB.

For the present, comments upthread give estimates that are in hundreds of terabytes to petabyte range. I'd say that, including deduplication, 50TB would be a conservative value. That's still 1000x of what you estimate for year 1900!

The exponent is going strong.

Thanks both of you for giving me a better picture of it.

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[0] - I entirely forgot about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society!