Qbyte?
They’ve moved over to quads. Whatever the hell they are. Around the TNG era they were talking in kiloquads I think by voy their into the gigaquad range.
My head canon is that a quad is a term employed due to the way isolinear chips store data in a 3d matrix.
In my head canon quad is a fundamental unit used in quantum computing, which I assume is a technology in common use in Trek.
That’s not far from reality. Quantum computers work with qubits.
Exactly. Just as binary digit got abbreviated to “bit” and a collection of (eight) bits became known as a “byte”, I figure something similar would happen for quantum digits -> qubits -> quads (because “qubytes” sounds awkward and “quants” sounds like something you couldn’t get say on network television).
Apparently, “gigaquads” and “teraquads”.
“Disorganized”
In terms of our current computers, you’re probably looking at something like yottabytes … but they don’t seem to store things in bytes at this point, as others say, quads. Which could mean that they’ve knocked the basic storage unit size from ‘byte’ to ‘4 bytes’ … A current 64-bit system can address 16 exabytes of memory, but if you were to knock that upward by an exponent of 4, you could address 65k exabytes, or 0.06 yottabytes.
That’s if we’re talking about memory capacities. Warm storage capability / use tends to be significantly larger than memory use, so I’d hazard a guess that the total storage capacity of a starship’s computers might be in the area of a few yottabytes.
This is assuming that “quad” is used because more space was required for memory architecture, and rather than upgrade to 128-bit or 256-bit computers, necessitating a huge amount of code refactoring, they just increased the minimum storage length. Of course, that would also realistically require a huge amount of code refactoring, but we’re all just making stuff up here, right? :D
