The really fun aspect of this for me, personally, is that I've been doing computers for ages (25 yrs or so?) now and 3TiB still intuitively feels like a massive amount of data even though I think I have something like 6TiB free space on my home server disks... which, in total, didn't even cost as much as a months' grocery shopping. Sometimes it really takes effort to rid yourself of these old intuitions that don't really work any more.
(I'm getting better at it!)
EDIT: And my desktop machine has -- let's see -- about 500000 times the RAM my first computer had. Truly astounding if you think about it.
I can remember going through this with a 10MB file about 15 year ago. It felt like a lot after growing up with floppy disks. But even a modest CPU could iterate over it quickly, I just didn't realise. I just assumed I would need to process it in a database!
(I'm getting better at it!)
EDIT: And my desktop machine has -- let's see -- about 500000 times the RAM my first computer had. Truly astounding if you think about it.