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

submitted 10 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Lmaydev@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's actually a decimal Vs binary thing.

1000 and 1024 take the same amount of bytes so 1024 makes more sense to a computer.

Nothing to do with metric as computers don't use that. Also not really to do with units.

this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023

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