The units we use to measure computers are dry and overly fastidious: the kilobyte, the megahertz. They feel metric and, frankly, European, despite America’s central role in this industry. To rectify this fault, I am proposing a set of Imperial computing units with their own joyous idiosyncrasies.

Storage

  • Punch – 80 bytes
  • Floppy – 18,000 punches
  • Jaz – 694 floppies

Processing

  • Nes – 7 million operations per second
  • Cray – 50 Neses
  • Wii – 34 Crays

Before we unveil networking, let’s pause for a moment to consider how the existing system handles it. All the units here are in terms of storage units per second (e.g., MB/s). That’s all fine and dandy and actually convenient in practice, but the Imperial system thinks little of convenience. Why should such a key facet of modern computing have to ride sidecar to storage? So, a distinct set of units is in order.

Networking

  • Net punch – 1 punch per second
  • Modem – 45 net punches
  • Trunk – 53.6 modems