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Kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes
(waspdev.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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From a programmer and optimizer perspecpective, I always prefer the original binary definitions for memory sizes.
Like, I prefer the speed and convenience of being able to perform bit shifts within a binary system to quickly multiply and divide by powers of 2, without the headache of having to think in decimal.
The whole base 10 thing is more meant for the average consumer and marketing, not those that actually understand the binary nature of the machine.
KiB for FTW :-)
been using it for years now when i need to be precise. colloquially, everyone i know still understands that contextually, K is 2^10
I'm not all about jamming a random i into terminology that was already well defined decades ago. But hey, you go for it if that's what you prefer.
By the way, 'for FTW' makes about as much sense as saying 'ATM machine', it's redundant.
KiB was defined decades ago... Way back in 1999. Before that it was not well defined. kb could mean binary or decimal depending on what or who was doing the measurements.
And? I started programming back in 1996, back when most computer storage and memory measurements were generally already well defined, around the base 2 binary system.
Floppy disks were about the only exception, 1.44MB was indeed base 10, but built on top of base 2 for cluster size. It was indeed a clusterfuck. 1.44MB was technically 1.38MiB when using modern terms.
I do wonder sometimes how many buffer overflow errors and such are the result of 'programmers' declaring their arrays in base 10 (1000) rather than base 2^10 (1024)... 🤔