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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 11 months ago by wischi to c/[email protected]

219 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Of course. The thing is, though, that if the units had been consistent to begin with, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much confusion. Most people would just accept MiB, GiB, etc. as the units on their storage devices. People already accept weird values for DVDs (~4.37GiB / 4.7GB), so if we had to use SI units then a 256GiB drive could be marketed as a ~275GB drive (obviously with the non-rounded value in the fine print, e.g. "Usable space approx. 274.8GB").

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

They were consistent until around 2005 (it's an estimate) when drives got large enough where the absolute difference between the two forms became significant. Before that everyone is computing used base 2 prefixes.

I bet OP does too when talking about RAM.