Star Trek mostly avoided that problem. They made up a fictional unit of data storage called a “quad” to avoid the problem of “the Borg source code is too big for our databanks, it’s 3.2 gigabytes in size.”

The author of the novelization of Wrath of Kahn didn’t see it coming; one of the scientists on Regula 1 in the book, not the movie, complains that his personal computer didn’t have enough room for a 4 megabyte “50 meg” game.

The Wrath of Kahn novel was released in 1982. The 1981 IBM PC already came with an optional 10MB HDD. So the author would have had to assume that storage space tech would basically never improve at all.

Okay I just looked it up, I’m going to amend my post after making this comment: The game is stated to be “fifty megs” in size. To which Carol Marcus replies “Christ on a crutch! It’s the program that swallowed Saturn!”

I’m not taking it out on the author here, Reagan hadn’t signed Moore’s Bill into law yet by 1982. The Atari 2600 had less than a kilobyte of RAM, just enough for the stack. The Commodore VIC-20 as shilled by Captain Kirk had 5k of RAM, about 8k of ROM, a diskette (formatted for the VIC-20) held 170k and a cassette tape could hold up to 300k. Also, IIRC, by 1982 Moore’s Bill hadn’t been signed into law by President Reagan yet. The exponential growth in computer capacity and power hadn’t begun. Why would the author see it coming?

Though, the author did avoid saying “megabytes” so it could be 50 “megaquads” which could be any amount of data, though that decision hadn’t been made yet.

It always impresses me that in TNG the episode they give Data’s specs that it’s still impossibly futuristic to this day.

He states his storage capacity as “800 quadrillion bits” which works out to ~100 petabytes?

In that form factor. We are getting closer to that just being normal. Right now, not possible.