In this day and age of computers and the internet, I do my humble bit to try and persuade people not to forget the printed word – at least in their leisure time. “Try wrapping your presents and breakables in a computer instead of newspaper”, I recently told my friend, Antonia.

Killer argument, no? But she wasn’t convinced. But even I have to admit that our world wouldn’t function quite so smoothly without computers. And a big complex airport like our new BBI airport simply wouldn’t be possible without these digital workhorses. A few days ago we opened the new BBI computer centre. Just imagine: in future, around 500 servers will be supplying processing power for the new airport. The centre has 100 terabytes of storage space. I sat down and did my sums. If I’m right, then the computer centre has the computing power of around 8,000 PCs. Or, to use a different unit, there is enough space on the BBI hard drives for more than 20,000 DVD films.

I simply can’t imagine how many books you could store there. “Well, a good deal more than we could fit in our anthill”, said Antonia, and there’s no arguing with that.

Wersja drukowana berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)