Technology

The only place where kilobyte is 1000 bytes has been Google and everywhere else it's 1024 so even if it's precise I don't see the advantage of changing usage. It would just cause more confusion at my work than make anything clearer.

This has been my pet rant for a long time, but I usually explain it .. almost exactly the other way around to you.

You can essentially start off with nothing using binary prefixes. IBM's first magnetic harddrive (the IBM 350 - you've probably seen it in the famous "forklifting it into a plane" photo) stored 5 million characters. Not 5*1024*1024 characters, 5,000,000 characters. This isn't some consumer-era marketing trick - this is 1956, when companies were paying half a million dollars a year (2023-inflated-adjusted) to lease a computer. I keep getting told this is some modern trick - doesn't it blow your mind to realise hdd manufacturers have been using base10 for nearly 70 years? Line-speed was always ~~a lie~~ base 10, where 1200 baud laughs at your 2^n fetish (and for that matter, baud comes from telegraphs, and was defined before computers existed), 100Mbit ethernet runs on a 25MHz clock, and speaking of clocks - kHz, MHz, MT/s, GT/s etc are always specified in base 10. For some reason no-one asks how we got 3GHz in between 2 & 4GHz CPUs.

As you say, memory is the trouble-maker. RAM has two interesting properties for this discussion. One is that it heavily favours binary-prefixed "round numbers", traditionally because no-one wanted RAM with un-used addresses because it made address decoding nightmarish (tl;dr; when 8k of RAM was usually 8x1k chips, you'd use the first 3 bits of the address to select the chip, and the other 10 bits as the address on the chip - if chips didn't use their entire address space you'd need to actually calculate the address map, and this calculation would have to run multiples of times faster than the cpu itself) . The second, is that RAM was the first place non-CSy types saw numbers big enough for k to start becoming useful. So for the entire generation that started on microcomputers rather than big iron, memory-flavoured-k were the first k they ever tasted.

I mean, hands up who had a computer with 8-64k of RAM and a cassette deck. You didn't measure the size of your stored program in kB, but in seconds of tape.

This shortcut than leaked into filesystems purely as an implementation detail - reading disk blocks into memory is much easier if you're putting square pegs into square holes. So disk sectors are specified in binary sizes to enable them to fit efficiently into memory regions/pages. For example, CP/M has a 128-byte disk buffer between 0x080 and 0x100 - and its filesystem uses 128-byte sectors. Not a coincidence.

This is where we start getting into stuff like floppy disk sizes being utter madness. 360k & 720k were 720 and 1440 512-byte sectors. When they doubled up again, we doubled 2800 512-byte sectors gave us 1440k - and because nothing is ever allowed to make sense (or because 1.40625M looks stupid), we used base10 to call this 1.44M.

So it's never been that computers used 1024-shaped-k's. It should be a simple story of "everything uses 1,000s, except memory because reasons". But once we started dividing base10-flavoured storage devices into base2-flavoured sectors, we lost any hope of this ever looking logical.

The mistake is thinking that a 1000 byte file takes up a 1000 bytes on any storage medium. The mistake is thinking that it even matters if a kB means 1000 or 1024 bytes. It only matters for some programmers, and to those 1024 is the number that matters.

Disregarding reality in favor of pedantics is the real mistake.

i mean, you can't get to 1000 by doubling twos, so, no?

Reality doesn't care what you prefer my dude

• 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.

Based on your other replies, no, I absolutely will not waste my time reading your opinion piece.

And, a blog post is just another way of saying this is your opinion. That's all it is.