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

submitted 10 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] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space

The difference was a lot smaller when you were dealing with 700 byte files - it was often a rounding error. Also - you needed two sectors (1024 bytes at the time) two store your 700 byte file, so what did it matter anyway? If you want to get really specific, you actually needed three sectors - because there's metadata on the file... however the metadata will share space with other files so does that count?

Filesystems are incredibly complex and there's no way they can be explained to a lay person. Storage is and always has been an approximation.

It's even worse with RAM these days - my Mac has 298TB of memory address space currently allocated... but only between 6GB and 7GB of "app memory" in use (literally fluctuating between those two from one second to the next when I'm not even doing anything but watching the memory usage).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, no, I'm sure I noticed it but I didn't really have the sophistication to get the implication.

Before we got our first Windows machine I had some DOS books. I remember a table in DOS for dummies talking about kilo/giga/petabytes and internalized it, but CDs were a thing by then.