David McCandless from Information is Beautiful tries to answer the question of how many millions of lines of code does it take to? For reference, the Visual Capitalist calculates that a million lines of code (MLOC), if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. That’s 14x the length of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The total lines of code to run systems vary widely as Mr. McCandless shows in the infographic.
It took less than a million lines of code to run the NASA Space Shuttle.
• The Mars Rover Curiosity takes less than 5 million lines of code to run.
• The latest version of the Firefox web browser includes just under 10 million lines of code.
• General Motors’ (GM) Chevy Volt requires just over 10 million lines of code.
• Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008 for the Apple (AAPL) Mac consists of over 35 million lines of code.
• And it took 50 million lines of code to bring us Microsoft Vista.
• Finally, all Google (GOOG) services combine for a whopping 2 billion lines – that means it would take 36 million pages to “print out” all of the code behind all Google services. That would be a stack of paper 2.2 miles high!
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.