Why do we have the number "googol" (not google)? (1 with 100 zeros...)

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Denman

i dare you to write a script and try to fill your hard drives with lots of 0's in a text file

When I read "Since a googol plus 1 is the number of digits in a googolplex, it would therefore not be possible to write down or store the digits of a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives." I doubted that was true. So I broke out calc.exe and went to work.

1E1000 / 8 = 1.25E999 bytes
1.25E999 / 1024= 1.220703125E996 megabytes
1.220703125E996 / 1024 = 1.1920928955078125E993 gigabytes
1.1920928955078125E993 / 1024 = 1.16415321826934814453125E990 terabytes
1.16415321826934814453125E990 / 1024 = 1.136868377216160297393798828125E987 petabytes
1.136868377216160297393798828125E987 / 1024 = 1.1102230246251565404236316680908E984 exabytes
1.1102230246251565404236316680908E984 / 1024 = 1.0842021724855044340074528008699E981 zettabytes
1.0842021724855044340074528008699E981 / 1024 = 1.0587911840678754238354031258496E978 yottabytes

Assuming 1 out of every 6 people in this world has a hard drive, with an average of 40GiB space... that means altogether there is 2,684,354,560,000,000,000 bits of space. That is 298.023223876953125 exabytes.

So I've come to the conclusion that Wikipedia was right, and I just wasted about 20 minutes of my life. Why must I question the all-knowing Wikipedia?