this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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148
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
210 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] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But on packaging of a disc it's misleading when they say gigabytes but mean gibibytes. These are technical terms with specific meaning. Kilo— means a factor of 1000, not "1000 within a couple of sig figs"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They don't advertise gigabytes or terabytes on the packaging though. They advertise gigabits and terabits, a made up marketing term that sounds technical and means almost nothing. If you want to rant against something, get angry with marketers using intentionally misleading terminology like this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I don't think I have seen anything advertised with bits other than network speed.

Though some mistakenly use "b" to mean bytes where the correct symbol is "B"

GB, TB, PB are in millions of-, thousands of millions of-, and millions of millions of- bytes respectively

If you buy ram though, you'll buy a package that says 32GB but it will not have 32 million bytes.