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] 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Here’s my favorite part.

“In addition, the conversions were sometimes not even self-consistent and applied completely arbitrary. The 3½-inch floppy disk for example, which was marketed as “1.44 MB”, was actually not 1.44 MB and also not 1.44 MiB. The size of the double-sided, high-density 3½-inch floppy was 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 160 tracks, that’s 512×18×16 = 1’474’560 bytes. To get to “1.44” you must first divide 1’474’560 by 1024 (“bEcAuSE BiNaRY obviously”) to get 1440 and then divide by 1000 for perfect inconsistency, because dividing by 1024 again would get you an ugly number and we definitely don’t want that. We finally end up with “1.44”. Now let’s add “MB” because why the heck not. We already abused those units so much it’s not like they still mean anything and it’s “close enough” anyways. By the way, that “close enough” excuse never “worked when I was in school but what would I know compared to the computer “scientists” back then.

When things get that messy, numbers don’t even mean anything any more. Might as well just label the products using entirely qualitative terms like “big” or “bigger”.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

❤️ Thank you for taking the time to read it.