It's truly amazing how quickly my browser loads 0.6GB of data. I remember when downloading a 1MB file involved phoning up a sysop in advance and leaving the modem on all night. We've come so far.
When I think about numbers like that it just seems (to me, and wrongly) like general progress that's not so crazy - the thought that really makes the speed of progress stand out to me is remembering when loading a single image - photo sized but not crazily high resolution - over dial-up was slow enough that you'd gradually see the image loading from top to bottom, and could see it gradually getting taller as more lines of pixels were downloaded and shown below the already loaded part. Contrasting that memory against the ability to now watch videos with much higher resolution per frame than those images were 30 years ago is what really makes me go "wow".
For anyone not old enough to remember, here's an example on YouTube (and a faster loading time than I remember often being the case!): https://youtube.com/watch?v=ra0EG9lbP7Y
You could more or less fit the full model on a single CD (or a DVD for the larger model sizes) but of course forget about trying to do inference for it on period hardware, it would be unusably slow.
