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.
That was a retcon, though. Initially the SI prefixes were used and used 1024 instead of 1000. I feel like people started getting more fussy about it as hard drives started hitting hundreds of gb.
Only CPUs and RAM use 1024. Floppy disks and hard drives going way back to the 1970’s used 1000. In software, both are used depending on the context (and also obviously depending on the software). Most modern operating systems use 1024 for RAM and 1000 for file sizes (in the early days of computing, that agreed upon approach didn’t exist, and it varied from one computer to the next).
@smokin_shinoby’s tech school was shit. There has never been consistency on this issue and it’s really sad that they failed to teach both numbering systems as they are (and always were) widely used.
Fair on the floppy thing. I was too young to have worried about that.
How do you define a recon? Were kilograms 1024 grams, too? When did that change? It seems it’s meant 1000 since metric was created in the 1700s, along with a binary prefix.
From the looks of it, software vendors were trying to recon the definition of “kilo” to be 1024.
Kilo was used outside of decimal power rules for data storage/memory because it could only use binary powers at smaller scales. Well, that’s the standard we went with anyway.
They didn’t ‘retcon’ the use of kilo as applicable to other units, they went with the closest power of two. When hard drive manufacturers decided to use power of tens it confused people and eventually got standardized by making kb power of ten and kib power of two.
From the looks of it you aren’t familiar with the situation.
This is all explained in the post we’re commenting on. The standard “kilo” prefix, from the metric system, predates modern computing and even the definition of a byte: 1700s vs 1900s. It seems very odd to argue that the older definition is the one trying to retcon.
The binary usage in software was/is common, but it’s definitely more recent, and causes a lot of confusion because it doesn’t match the older and bigger standard. Computers are very good at numbers, they never should have tried the hijack the existing prefix, especially when it was already defined by existing International standards. One might be able to argue that the US hadn’t really adopted the metric system at the point of development, but the usage of 1000 to define the kilo is clearly older than the usage of 1024 to define the kilobyte. The main new (last 100 years) thing here is 1024 bytes is a kibibyte.
Kibi is the recon. Not kilo.
Kilo meaning 1,000 inside computer science is the retcon.
Tell me, how much RAM do you have in your PC. 16 gig? 32 gig?
Surely you mean 17.18 gig? 34.36 gig?