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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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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago

But that's also a simple answer: kilo is a metric prefix that means 1000, so kilobyte means 1000 bytes. The historical context is the history of the metric system, which is much older than modern computers.