147
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
(zeta.one)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
147 points (69.7% liked)
Technology
59689 readers
1589 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Power of 2 makes more sense to the computer. 1000 makes more sense to people.
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").
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.
It's not as simple as that. A lot of "computer things" are not exact powers of two. A prominent example would be HDDs.
In terms of storage 1000 and 1024 take the same amount of ~~bytes~~ bits to represent. So from a computer point of view 1024 makes a lot more sense.
It's just a binary Vs decimal thing. 1000 is not nicely represented in binary the same as 1024 isn't in decimal.
Edit: was talking about storing the actual number.
What? No. A terabyte in 1024 units is 8,796,093,022,208 bits. In 1000 units it's 8,000,000,000,000 bits.
The difference is substantial with larger numbers.
Both require the same amount of bits again. So the second one makes more sense for a computer.