Although this quote is attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum in 1996, many agree that it was said much earlier, perhaps with minor variations.
From your link:
Seems that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, posted something similar about moving a petabyte of data a couple months ago. He chose to use a sailboat for his example.
"Bit meters per second" or "megabyte kilometers per hour" would be a better measure than just "bits per second".
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: