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 10 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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[โ€“] [email protected] -4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can't store data in base 10, nor address memory or storage in base 10 given present computers. It's a bit more than a matter of opinion that computers are base 2

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Yes computers are base 2 but we can still make up whatever rules we want about them. We could even make up rules that say that we are to consider everything a computer does to be in base 10 but it can only use the lowest 2 values of any given digit. It would be a total mess and it would make no sense whatsoever but we could define those rules.