91–100 of 430 posts
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Even then it was not universal. For example, that Apple I ad that got posted a few days ago mentioned that "the system is expandable to 65K". https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
Seems like a typo given that the ad contains many mentions of K (8K, 32K) and they're all of the 1024 variety.
The author doesn’t actually answer their question, unless I missed something?
They go on to make a few more observations, and say finally only that the current different definitions are sometimes confusing, to non experts.
I don’t see much of an argument here for changing anything. Some non experts experience minor confusion about two things that are different, did I miss something bigger in this?
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I'm not seeing evidence for a 1970s 1000-byte kilobyte. Wikipedia's floppy disk page mentions the IBM Diskette 1 at 242944 bytes (a multiple of 256), and then 5¼-inch disks at 368640 bytes and 1228800 bytes, both multiples of 1024. These are sector sizes. Nobody had a 1000-byte sector, I'll assert.
The wiki page agrees with parent, "The double-sided, high-density 1.44 MB (actually 1440 KiB = 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB) disk drive, which would become the most popular, first shipped in 1986"
> 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes Agreed. For the naysayers out there, consider these problems: * You have 1 "MB" of RAM on a 1 MHz system bus which can transfer 1 byte per clock cycle. How many seconds does it take to read the entire memory? * You have 128 "GB" of RAM and you have an empty 128 GB SSD. Can you successfully hibernate the computer system by storing all of RAM on the SSD? * My camera shoots 6000×4000…
They didn't abuse the definitions. It's simply the result of dealing with pins, wires, and bits. For your problems, for example, you won't ever have a system with 1 "MB" of RAM where that's 1,000,000 bytes. The 8086 processor had 20 address lines, 2^20, that's 1,048,576 bytes for 1MB. SI units make no sense for computers.
The only problem is unscrupulous hardware vendors using SI units on computers to sell you less capacity but advertise more.
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Sure outside of computing in other science it has a meaning but in binary computing traditionally prefix + byte implied binary number quantities. Many things acquire domain specific nuanced meaning ..
And yet in computing, a 1kHz clock is still 1000 cycles per second, and 1 MFLOP is still 1,000,000 floating-point operations per second.
"in binary computing traditionally prefix + byte implied binary number quantities."
There are no bytes involved in Hz or FLOPs.
Final edit: This ambiguity is documented at least back to 1984, by IBM, the pre-eminent computer company of the time. In 1972 IBM started selling the IBM 3333 magnetic disk drive. This product catalog [0] from 1979 shows them marketing the corresponding disks as "100 million bytes" or "200 million bytes" (3336 mdl 1 and 3336 mdl 11, respectively). By 1984, those same disks were marketed in the "IBM Input/Output Devic…
> The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. Which is the reality. "kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There's no possible discussion over this fact. Many people have been using it wrong for decades, but its literal value did not change.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.html
And he was right.
Context is important.
"K" is an excellent prefix for 1024 bytes when working with small computers, and a metric shit ton of time has been saved by standardizing on that.
When you get to bigger units, marketing intervenes, and, as other commenters have pointed out, we have the storage standard of MB == 1000 * 1024.
But why is that? Certainly it's because of the marketing, but also it's because KB has been standardized for bytes.
> Which is the reality. "kilobyte" means "1000 bytes". There's no possible discussion over this fact.
You couldn't be more wrong. Absolutely nobody talks about 8K bytes of memory and means 8000.
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That is a prescriptivist way of thinking about language, which is useful if you enjoy feeling righteous about correctness, but not so helpful for understanding how communication actually works. In reality-reality, "kilobyte" may mean either "1000 bytes" or "1024 bytes", depending on who is saying it, whom they are saying it to, and what they are saying it about. You are free to intend only one meaning in your own com…
I understand the usual meaning, but I use the correct meaning when precision is required.
Now, it depends.
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Seems like a typo given that the ad contains many mentions of K (8K, 32K) and they're all of the 1024 variety.
If you're using base 10, you can get "8K" and "32K" by dividing by 10 and rounding down. The 1024/1000 distinction only becomes significant at 65536.
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In computers, "kilobyte" has a context dependent meaning. It has been thus for decades. It does not only mean 1000 bytes.
I understand the usual meaning, but I use the correct meaning when precision is required.