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0 pointsporges10y ago0 comments

Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath... [This page is 3,780 bytes.]

In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...

This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable.

So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May).

Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!

0 comments

ejol10y ago

Why would you interpret 3 599 Mbytes as 3.599, and not as 3599 Mbytes? 3599MB/728506 = 4.95 kB (assuming 1000 kB in an MB).

porgesOP10y ago

Because that seems to be what the person who came up with the "63 MB" figure has done.

logicallee10y ago

it reads as if by order of magnitude jump you mean "megabyte to gigabyte" but (obviously, now that I point it out) that is 3 orders of magnitude jump!

hobofan10y ago

I think he is correct. An order of magnitude change for (most) SI units is a change by a factor of 10, while it is a change by a factor of 1024 for bytes.

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