147

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

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

208 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] ares35@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

that's what it was initially, reporting decimal 'megabytes' for hdd capacity. lawsuits and settlements followed.

the dust settled and what we have now is disclaimers on storage products (from the legal settlements) and they continue to use 'decimal' measurements...

and we also a different set of prefixes for 'binary' units of measurements (standards body trying to address the problem of confusion): kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, exbi; which are not widely used yet.. the 'old' ones are for decimal but still commonly used for binary.

this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023

147 points (69.7% liked)

Technology

59340 readers

1483 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