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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

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Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#201

Post by krater23 »

soneil wrote: post #153
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…

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts. RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture). We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

Nope. The first home computers like the C64 had RAM and sectors on disc, which in case of the C64 means 256 bytes. And there it is again, the smaller base of 1024.

Just later, some marketing assholes thought they could better sell their hard drives when they lie about the size and weasel out of legal issues with redefining the units.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#203

Post by rep_lodsb »

soneil wrote: post #158
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…

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 characters. The very first harddrive was base-10. Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans. Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs o…

RAMAC, not RAMDAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...

However it doesn't seem to be divided into sectors at all, more like each track is like a loop of magnetic tape. In that context it makes a bit more sense to use decimal units, measuring in bits per second like for serial comms.

Or maybe there were some extra characters used for ECC? 5 million / 100 / 100 = 500 characters per track, leaves 72 bits over for that purpose if the actual size was 512.

First floppy disks - also from IBM - had 128-byte sectors. IIRC, it was chosen because it was the smallest power of two that could store an 80-column line of text (made standard by IBM punched cards).

Disk controllers need to know how many bytes to read for each sector, and the easiest way to do this is by detecting overflow of an n-bit counter. Comparing with 80 or 100 would take more circuitry.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#204

Post by cyanydeez »

bruce343434 wrote: post #195
bloppe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Bob says "kilobyte" to Alice, and Bob means 5432 bytes, and Alice perceives him to mean 5432 bytes, then in that context, "kilobyte" means 5432 bytes.

What are the odds of Charlie meeting Bob and Alice?

Is charlie a marketing exec?

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#205

Post by gpm »

soneil wrote: post #153
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…

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts. RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture). We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

RAM having binary sizing is a perfectly good reason for hard drives having binary sized sectors (more efficient swap, memory maps, etc), which in turn justifies all of hard disks being sized in binary.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#206

Post by hnlmorg »

quotemstr wrote: post #183
kstrauser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely believe you're right. It comes across like "the people who are right can use the disputed word, and the people who are wrong can use this infantile one". I don't know what the better alternative would have been, but this certainly wasn't it.

Thinking about it a bit, I think I'd have 1. defined traditional suffixes and abbreviations to mean powers of two, not ten, aligning with most existing usages, but... 2. deprecated their use, especially in formal settings... 3. defined new spelled-out vocabulary for both pow10 and pow2 units, e.g. in English "two megabytes" becomes "two binary megabytes" or "two decimal megabytes", and... 4. defined new unambiguous a…

That’s basically what Kibi et al is though. It’s Ki(lo) bi(nary) — kibi.

Yeah it sounds dumb, but it’s really not that different from your suggestion.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#207

Post by nitwit005 »

ValdikSS wrote: post #82

>Why do we often say 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes? Because Windows, and only Windows, shows it this way. It is official and documented: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17... > Explorer is just following existing practice. Everybody (to within experimental error) refers to 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, not a kibibyte. If Explorer were to switch to the term kibibyte, it would merely be showing users in…

Raymond Chen's blog isn't exactly official documentation, even if it's frequently better than the documentation.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#208

Post by timschmidt »

throw0101c wrote: post #190
tombert wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> It doesn't matter. "kilo" means 1000. People are free to use it wrong if they wish. > All words are made up. Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix > […] as long as both parties understand and are consistent in their usage to each other. And if they don't?…

> Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up

Good for them. People make up their own definitions for words all the time. Some of those people even try to get others to adopt their definition. Very few are ever successful. Because language is about communicating shared meaning. And there is a great deal of cultural inertia behind the kilo = 2^10 definition in computer science and adjacent fields.

Re: 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?

#210

Post by f33d5173 »

A mile is exactly 1000 paces, or 4000 feet. You may disagree, but consider: the word mile come from latin for "one thousand". Therefore a mile must be 1000 of something, namely paces. I hope you find this argument convincing.
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