This hasn’t been answered, and in the Encyclopedia, it says: No, we don’t know how many bytes are in a kiloquad. We don’t even want to know. The reason the term was invented was specifically to avoid describing the data capacity of Star Trek’s computers in 20th-century terms. It was feared … that any such attempt would look foolish in just a few years, given the current rate of progress in that field. However, many r.a.st.tech contributors have converged on kiloquad to mean 1000 (kilo) * 1 quadrillion bytes (or bits, but we’ll stick with bytes for the explanation), the premise being that the phrase “quad” came into use instead of “pet” for Petabyte, since that sounds dumb. Then the kilo-, Mega- and Giga- prefixes were recycled. Depending on where you live, a quadrillion is either 10^15 (American definition) or 10^24 (European definition). If Americans came up with this definition, that makes a kiloquad 10^18 bytes, which is around 2^60 bytes, which is about a billion gigabytes. If a
I have a theory about kiloquads that I haven’t seen around yet. I think a Kiloquad is a logarithmic scale. 2100 bytes is 1 Kiloquad, 2200 bytes is 2 kiloquads, etc. The kiloquad is the base 2 exponent of the number of bytes divided by 100.
Moore’s Law is an observation that computer capacity roughly doubles every 2 years.
An Isolinear Optical Chip in Star Trek is about the same size as a modern USB key.
The largest commonly available USB key in January 2011 is 256 Gb. If we apply Moore’s Law to the year 2365 (when Star Trek TNG existed) then after you do the math the same sized package (isolinear chip) should hold 2215 bytes.
The show says an isolinear chip holds 2.15 Kiloquads which matches this prediction exactly.
No, this isn’t stated anyplace in the Star Trek canon. But then again NO comparison to modern computers is stated any place. However I like this explanation because it matches the expected growth in computers. Also, it is logical given the expected exponential growth in memory measurement that will come in real-life quantum computers.