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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#121

Post by bombcar »

theamk wrote: post #75
cedilla wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got it exactly the wrong way around. And that with such great confidence! There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established. Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see h…

it's, way older in than the 1990's! In computering, "K" always meant 1024 at least from 1970's. Example: in 1972, DEC PDP 11/40 handbook [0] said on first page: "16-bit word (two 8-bit bytes), direct addressing of 32K 16-bit words or 64K 8-bit bytes (K = 1024)". Same with Intel - in 1977 [1], they proudly said "Static 1K RAMs" on the first page. [0] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2005/readings/pdp11-40.pdf [1] http…

It was exactly this - and nobody cared until the disks (the only thing that used decimal K) started getting so big that it was noticeable. With a 64K system you're talking 1,536 "extra" bytes of memory - or 1,536 bytes of memory lost when transferring to disk.

But once hard drives started hitting about a gigabyte was when everyone started noticing and howling.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#122

Post by ablob »

tombert wrote: post #115
pif wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never heard It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish.

All words are made up. They weren’t handed down from a deity, they were made up by humans to communicate ideas to other humans. “Kilo” can mean what we want in different contexts and it’s really no more or less correct as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other.

I find it concerning that kilo can mean both 10^3 and 2^10 depending on context. And that the context is not if you're speaking about computery stuff, but which program you use has almost certainly lead to avoidable bugs.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#123

Post by leoc »

nerdsniper wrote: post #9

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 article presents wishful thinking. The wish is for "kilobyte" to have one meaning. For the majority of its existence, it had only one meaning - 1024 bytes. Now it has an ambiguous meaning. People wish for an unambiguous term for 1000 bits, however that word does not exist. People also might wish that others use kibibyte any time they reference 1024 bytes, but that is also wishful thinking.

> The author's wishful thinking is falsely presented as fact.

There's good reason why the meanings of SI prefixes aren't set by convention or by common usage or by immemorial tradition, but by the SI. We had several thousand years of setting weights and measures by local and trade tradition and it was a nightmare, which is how we ended up with the SI. It's not a good show for computing to come along and immediately recreate the long and short ton.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#125

Post by quanwinn »

ineedasername wrote: post #92

> Why does 1000 still make more sense? 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 someth…

Was reading this and thought the same thing.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#126

Post by kstrauser »

cmovq wrote: post #21

The mistake was using the "Kibi" prefix. "Kibibyte" just sounds a bit silly when said out loud.

Yes, 2**10 times this, yes.

Call me calcitrant, reactionary, or whatever, but I will not say kibibyte out loud. It's a dumb word and I'm not using it. It was a horrible choice.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#127

Post by bombcar »

pjdesno wrote: post #79

I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s. I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units) Fun fact - for a long time consu…

Wirespeeds and bitrate and baud and all that stuff is vastly confusing when you start looking into it - because it's hard to even define what a "bit on the wire" is when everything has to be encoded in such a way that it can be decoded (specialized protocols can go FASTER than normal ones on the same wire and the same mechanism if they can guarantee certain things - like never having four zero bits in a row).

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#129

Post by [deleted] »

nayuki wrote: post #38

> 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…

[deleted]
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