Kiloquad
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A kiloquad is a unit of memory originally conceived from the Star Trek series. Within the Star Trek universe, one kiloquad is equal to 1000 "quads," and one "quad" is equal to 4000 Iso-bits.
Aside from this, the actual amount of memory in 1 kiloquad had not been defined meaningfully (as in terms of bytes) by the creators of the series. The reason the term was invented in the first place was to mask the data capacity of the futuristic computers of Star Trek, in anticipation that an actual description might appear foolish in the not-to-distant future as a result of advancing computer technology in the real world.
Later on, however, many r.a.st.tech contributors have converged on 1 kiloquad being equal to 1000 (kilo) * 1 quadrillion bytes, which becomes approximately equal to 1 exabyte or 1 billion gigabytes.
Quads could also refer to four-state data, rather than two-state (binary) seen in today's computers. Four-state data would require quantum computers, which has been referenced before (in an episode of Deep Space Nine, Rom says that mental patterns must be stored at the quantum level, due to their extreme complexity). So it would only make sense for quads to refer to four-state.
External link
- Quad (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Quad) at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek WikiWiki