Hey guys, this has been bugging me all night (and before this, many times over the years), but I swear there was an episode where Riker and Picard(?) were discussing the Enterprise's computer, and Riker, while standing near the Tactical station on the Bridge, says something like "a million K?" referring to the ship's memory capacity. Does anyone else remember this? I can't seem to find it anywhere, and I checked the really obvious episode (11001001), but it just sticks out in my memory (heh heh) as something that was in an episode. I'm certain I didn't imagine it. Ideas?
TNG showed the computer access room in "Evolution" and/or "The Bonding," if I'm not mistaken. So, go back ... relax, with some beer and popcorn ... re-Watch and re-Enjoy 2 well-crafted episodes of the best damn STAR TREK series in the franchise!
Are you thinking of the scene where Riker is BSing his way through how the computer operates in Rascals?
Something like that may have been said in 11001001, but rather quickly the writers (thanks to the science advisor) moved on a "future" [fake] measurement of data storage called "quads" since it was very clear that if they used standard bytes to describe the computers in TNG whatever people thought was a lot of data storage circa 1988 would quickly be considered ridiculously small by the march of progress. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Quad And indeed that's true even within the lifetime of TNG's production, in 1987 the average hard drive size was approx. 20 - 40MB and cost around $1000 and in 1994 that same $1k could get you a 1TB (1,000MB) hard drive.
Well, I watched both episodes, and Riker doesn't say it there. I'm sure he said it, though. That's not it, but that was a funny scene. Good ol' Riker BS. It's pure. Indeed. What started it last night was when "Measure of a Man," Data mentioned that he could process at 60 teraFLOPS, and his brain could hold a maximum of 800 quadrillion bits of information. We have supercomputers that operate far beyond that now, and desktop computers are fast approaching.