this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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143
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 10 months 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] 1 points 10 months ago

209GB? That probably doesn't include all of the RAM: like in the SSD, GPU, NIC, and similar. Ironically, I'd probably approximate it to 200GB if that was the standard, but it isn't. It wouldn't be that much of a downgrade to go to 200GB from 192GiB. Is 192 and 209 that different? It's not much different from remembering the numbers for a 1.44MiB floppy, 1.5436Mbps T1 lines, or ~3.14159 pi approximation. Numbers generally end up getting weird: trying to keep it in binary prefixes doesn't really change that.

The definition of kilo being "1000" was standard before computer science existed. If they used it in a non-standard way: it may have been common or a decent approximation at the time, but not standard. Does that justify the situation today, where many vendors show both definitions on the same page, like buying a computer or a server? Does that justify the development time/confusion from people still not understanding the difference? Was it worth the PR reaction from Samsung, to: yet again, point out the difference?

It'd be one thing if this confusion had stopped years ago, and everyone understood the difference today, but we're not: and we're probably not going to get there. We have binary prefixes, it's long past time to use them when appropriate-- but even appropriate uses are far fewer than they appear: it's not like you have a practical 640KiB/2GiB limit per program anymore. Even in the cases you do: is it worth confusing millions/billions on consumer spec sheets?