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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] 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It totally is a matter of opinion. These are arbitrary rules, made up by us. We can make up whatever rules we want to.

I agree that it's weird that only in CS kilo means 1024. It would be logical to change that, to keep consistency across different fields of science. But that does not make it any less a matter of opinion.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can't store data in base 10, nor address memory or storage in base 10 given present computers. It's a bit more than a matter of opinion that computers are base 2

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

Yes computers are base 2 but we can still make up whatever rules we want about them. We could even make up rules that say that we are to consider everything a computer does to be in base 10 but it can only use the lowest 2 values of any given digit. It would be a total mess and it would make no sense whatsoever but we could define those rules.