All this discussion of what lies beyond "yotta" conjures up images of a lively debate between ancient Roman mathematicians about how to properly extend the numerical system. What comes after M? What do we do when we run out of letters? Positional decimal notation and scientific notation are great achievements, adressing the ambiguities and limitations inherent in other numerical systems. What then is the efficacy of making up names for large numbers? It just leads us back to the problem we avoided by adopting these notations in the first place. It's not as if we need systematic naming conventions for large numbers. Since people in general don't like to deal with large numbers, they routinely invent terminology to avoid them. We buy a gross of eggs, earn 75K a year, and our computer has 30 gig of disk. Back in 1977, when I first set my hands on a computer, a gigabyte of storage would have been a phenominal luxury. Today, it is as common as dirt to hear "gig of disk." Most computer users see a "gig" as a unit of disk space or memory, much as a cup is a unit of liquid. They neither know nor care that "giga" means 10^9, that a "gig" or gigabyte is actually 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes, or even what a byte is. If the term gigabyte had never existed, another term would have been coined for a convenient unit of disk space. In a language so rich in names for numbers and numbers of things, it seems almost counter(over?)productive to dream up more. ----- Original Message ----- Allan Wechsler wrote:

Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Heta, Oto, Nea

Starting from Tera, they are derived by doing some sort of surgery on the Greek word for the log base-1000. For Tera, Peta, and Exa, I believe this is just a coincidence; the idea behind the extension to Heta, Oto, and Nea is to pretend that the coincidence was intentional. Look: it still has unique initial letters, so the KB, MB, GB, TB system can be extended without ambiguity.

--ACW