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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Kilobyte is 2^10 bytes or about a thousand bytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
Megabyte is 2^20 bytes or about a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.
Terabyte is 2^30 bytes or about a a thousand megabytes within a few reasonably significant digits.

The binary storage is always going to be a translation from a binary base to a decimal equivalent. So the shorthand terms used to refer to a specific and long integer number should comes as absolutely no surprise. And that's just it; they're just a shorthand, slang jargon that caught on because it made sense to anyone that was using it.

Your whole article just makes it sound like you don't actually understand the math, the way computers actually work, linguistics, or etymology very well. But you're not really here for feedback are you. The whole rant sounds like a reaction to a bad grade in a computer science 101 course.