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Weight and size first.
Documents take up space, and they take up weight. Ask any traveling salesman or company rep about the weight they have to carry. Some documents need to go there by hand, they’re sensitive, and some are just flat out convenient to have close to you on a plane or in a limo, or in the classroom for you to study or refer to- or add to.
In my computer I have a LOT of pages in my wiki. These are averaging about 3 Kb per document. Let’s be generous and say every one is 5Kb- which is stretching it rater seriously.
Paper has 2 sides; let’s assume we print on both sides. This cuts the paper weight in half. Relax, I still win, I already did the math.
A ream of paper normally has 500 pages of paper. That’s 2 X 500 X 3Kb, or 3,000,000 bytes- that’s 3Mb of data approximately. That’s one entire ream, storing text on both sides of every page to capacity. Remember, that’s what paper is, data storage media. Doodles are images, and images are data. Text is data; it’s all data. BTW, I rounded up; my test document had 1.406 Kb per side.
Now 1Mb is 1000 Kb of data- 1000X 1000 bytes, and a keystroke is 1 byte in most formats. There are 1000 Mb in 1 Gb of disk space on a HDD (a Hard Disk Drive, the sort with spinning platters) or a SSD (the solid state data storage device that looks like a HDD to the operating system in the computer).
Let’s assign 5 Gb of space on a typical 160Gb disk drive in a netbook to holding pages in the wiki. So the wiki has 5,000,000,000 bytes of text. 5Gb/3Kb=1,666,666 pages. /2 as we print on both sides of the page=833,333; /500 as we are counting REAMS here=1666 reams of paper.
ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED SIXTY SIX REAMS, at 5-6 lbs per ream=9166 pounds, which is 4.58 English TONS. Got a strong back?
Ream weight varies according to paper type and thickness, so it is difficult to give a simple answer to what it weighs. But it’s AT LEAST 2 POUNDS EACH for any sort of paper thicker than onion skin tracing paper. (More-see footenote.)
So to carry the company's document inventory, get a pickup truck. Or
you can carry a 3 pound netbook, and have room left over. You decide.
And that was only 5 of the 160 Gb on the thing’s hard drive. To carry the company library, use most of the hard drive- shall we say 100Gb?
Even if we have an 8 Gb SSD (solid state drive, a flash drive which looks like a hard drive to the operating system) and only allow space for the programs and 1Gb for the pages, we still can carry more than Arny Swartzafella on his best day. Some public libraries do not contain that much text.
Am I making a good point yet?
Now size.
The ream, just one bloody ream, is 8.5 ”X 11” X 3-5”, depending on paper thickness. Assume ream thickness of 4”; that’s a total of 374 cubic inches. JUST FOR ONE REAM.
Let’s take one popular model of netbook, the Acer Aspire One 751h-11.6”. 250Gb HDD. The weight is estimated by the maker with a 6 cell battery as 3.0 lbs (1.3Kg) (this is the battery estimated to give ‘up to 8 hours of performance, depending on usage’). Size 11.2” X 7.8” X 1.0” (WDH when lying flat on a table folded shut). That’s 87.36” cubic inches TOTAL, bottom line final. With your entire stack of stuff stuffed in there.
Now which would you like to carry around all day? Do the math. Notice we did not come CLOSE to using a serious fraction of the hard drive in this estimate.
Now can we talk about the computer revolution, and why it seriously rivals and exceeds that of the Gutenberg press?
1 Ream, 500 sheets each item in list following:
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