That reminds me, I was as a public service going to make an auto-updating epub of Neuromancer which simply incremented the units as needed to sound duly impressive.

"His buyer for the three petabytes of hot RAM..." etc...

Better off making something up. Flebibytes or something. Gibson should've done that in the original.

Or being deliberately nonspecific. Three memory modules, going cheap if no questions asked. That's why Snow Crash still reads so well, it skirts the quantitative and focuses on the qualitative.

That's why Star Trek used things like kiloquads. Unless and until you know what a "quad" is, it's just a number in mid-air.

Flebibytes? That's a crazy amount.

On the street, sure.

In academe anything under ten mangabytes is noise these days tho and I imagine the dark economy is two factors beyond anything we have access to. :/

What defined "golden age" cyberpunk that set it apart from ordinary science fiction? My modern mind associates the term with movies and video games that boil down to knock offs of Blade Runner and Deus Ex.

There's a fairly good analogy between SF and music. 70s music (and SF) was fat and bloated and slow. High concept stuff about galactic empires and gatefold sleeves and Serious Issues - Vietnam and the nature of reality.

And suddenly this fast, spiky thing appears, that's all nihilism and dystopia and edge and noir and anti-heroes and technology abuse, and instead of looking ahead a billion years it's looking ahead about 15 minutes, and instead of sounding like an orchestra it sounds like the wind over tensioned steel cables, and it wears sunglasses at night and it thinks technology is power and its just so gosh-darned cool...

Yeah, that's pretty much what it was like. Ok, it's all cliches now, but so's a modern punk band.

People forget that there was a reason for the "punk" in cyberpunk, and it wasn't mohawks and leather jackets.

It depends on what the three megabytes consists of. It could be quite lucrative.