this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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153
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] 4 points 11 months ago

that's what it was initially, reporting decimal 'megabytes' for hdd capacity. lawsuits and settlements followed.

the dust settled and what we have now is disclaimers on storage products (from the legal settlements) and they continue to use 'decimal' measurements...

and we also a different set of prefixes for 'binary' units of measurements (standards body trying to address the problem of confusion): kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, exbi; which are not widely used yet.. the 'old' ones are for decimal but still commonly used for binary.