Technology

59569 readers

4136 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

147

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

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

211 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mb_@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Weird numbering system? Things are still stored in blocks of 8 bits at the end, it doesn't matter.

When it gets down to what matter on hard drives, every byte still uses 8 bits, and all other numbers for people actually working with computer science that matter are multiples of 8, not 10.

And because all internal systems use base 8, base 10 is "slower" (not that it matters any longer.