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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)

submitted 11 months ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] meekah@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (11 children)

there is nothing intrinsically base 2 about hard drives

did you miss the part where those devices store binary data?

[+] wischi@programming.dev -13 points 11 months ago (10 children)

Binary prefixes (the ones with 1024 conversations) are used to simplify numbers that are exact powers of two - for example RAM and similar types of memory. Hard drive sizes are never exact powers of two. Disk storing bits don't have anything to do with the size of the disk.

[–] meekah@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

sure, but one of the intrinsic properties of binary data is that it is in binary sized chunks. you won't find a hard drive that stores 1000 bits of data per chunk.

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