Comment by dingaling
7 years ago
The authors of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual in the early 1990s sidestepped unforseeable computing progress by referring to 'kiloquads' of storage and never relating it to contemporary measurements.
Since part of its purpose was as a writer's guide that terminlogy slipped into the shows and was quite believable when some character expressed surprise that a tiny chip could carry '15 kiloquads' of data. It worked very well.
I'd argue it's poor writing that needed to refer to the amount of data, for anything. TNG really lost its way in technobabble.