4 ms·

> There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. If that was correct, this HN post wouldn't exist. For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, a

> There was never one commonly accepted meaning for a MB. If that was correct, this HN post wouldn't exist. For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes.

pseudalopex 6y ago
No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...
- argvargc 6y ago
  This wikipedia article quoting a standard formalised in the late 90's, and only beginning to gain adoption from that point on, largely supports my statement.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    The Wikipedia article lists things that always used the base 10 definition. It has examples of disks from the 1970s. And it mentions a 3rd definition of megabyte used since the 1980s.
coldtea 6y ago
>For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes. You'd be surprised... M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century, widely used in science, networking standards and disks, decades before Apple made any change itself...
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Even science isn't that consistent about it. The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. Yet we don't have megakilograms. We have megagrams, but nobody uses them. Instead we use tons. Somehow kilotons and megatons are used though. If we're willing to accept the above then why couldn't we have stuck with the powers of 2? Digital information at some level is going to become base 2.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >$10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Money is not covered by S.I./metric units anyway, so not sure what's the point of this argument. And even at that, while M here is the "mega" unit, the value 10M is still 10 million (1010^6) dollars (not 102^20 dollars).
  - turbopony 6y ago
    That's a good point. We might have to start saying megadollars. M$10 looks kind of clumsy, though.
  - rualca 6y ago
    > Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. The unit of currency is the dollar. There is no units of currency that corresponds to 1M dollars. The SI system of units devised a systematic way to define derived units that reflect a certain amount expressed in the base unit. Currency don't have the benefit.
  - soneil 6y ago
    > The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. This reminds me of something I was unaware of until very recently; the decibel (dB), is one tenth of a Bel. The discussion was that you'll never confuse a B(byte) with a B(bel) because we never specify 10dB as 1B, and we almost never need to specify a 10th of a byte. But back to your point - we use base10 for everything but RAM. So if we'd stuck to one system to avoid confusion, RAM probably wouldn't have won.
- argvargc 6y ago
  The "highest selling single computer model" of all time was not called the Commodore 65.536, it was called the Commodore 64. As was the common convention, all advertising materials, all reviews, all documentation and all common understanding was that the 64 in its title represented 64KB as in Kilobytes. This same convention, for MB = Megabytes, and GB = Gigabytes and all of these representing powers of 2 (no matter how "incorrect" that may be), was proliferated through the overwhelming majority of advertising, commentary and documentation both previously through the 70's, and through the 80's, 90's and 2000's. This was the convention commonly understood for the many-decades-long duration of the birth of modern computing. To attempt to change it after decades of intrenchment for the "technically correct" version and gain loads of confusion, and almost nothing in return, is a bad value proposition.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >This was the convention commonly understood for the many-decades-long duration of the birth of modern computing. As countless others already wrote here, that (and all your examples) where the case (and remain the case) for memory. Disks, network, etc, have used the powers of ten since forever...
    - argvargc 6y ago
      Disks are memory, and many floppy disk manufacturers for example seemed perfectly capable of following the long-established convention for memory without (much) issue.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Which is neither here, nor there. Hard disks are not floppy disks or memory, they always used base10 since half a millenium, and Apple just continues the same, like everybody else. End of non story.
  - soneil 6y ago
    I've never disputed that this was the convention for RAM. But it never has been for harddrives. To borrow your C64 example, the most popular harddrives to add to a C64 were Lt.Kernal(Fiscal) drives. The first model, sold as 10MB, was 256 bytes per sector, 32 sectors per track, for 1224 tracks. Giving us a raw capacity of 10,027,008 bytes - 10MB or 9.5MiB. You're talking about it being a convention in home computers when the vast, vast majority of them simply didn't have harddrives - While the machines that did have harddrives were already using base10 (an RK05 was 1.2Mwords - 1,200,000 words. Twice the RK04's 600kwords). The convention has always been base2 for RAM and base10 for storage. And yes, it's always caused confusion. Just as the convention has always been bits/sec instead of bytes/sec for linespeed, even though this also causes confusion to this day. The awkward truth is that none of this was ever intended to be consistent. From the day we started selling computers to people who weren't 100% sure what these numbers meant, it's always been "close enough".

pseudalopex 6y ago

No.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Units_based_on_powers_of_...

argvargc 6y ago
This wikipedia article quoting a standard formalised in the late 90's, and only beginning to gain adoption from that point on, largely supports my statement.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  The Wikipedia article lists things that always used the base 10 definition. It has examples of disks from the 1970s. And it mentions a 3rd definition of megabyte used since the 1980s.

coldtea 6y ago

>For the 50 years preceding Apple's intervention, any example that can be produced of MB equalling 1,000,000 bytes, likely has about one MiB-worth of counter-examples showing it equalling 1,048,576 bytes. You'd be surprised... M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century, widely used in science, networking standards and disks, decades before Apple made any change itself...

Aerroon 6y ago
>M has been the accepted prefix for 1,000,000 since the 19th century Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Even science isn't that consistent about it. The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. Yet we don't have megakilograms. We have megagrams, but nobody uses them. Instead we use tons. Somehow kilotons and megatons are used though. If we're willing to accept the above then why couldn't we have stuck with the powers of 2? Digital information at some level is going to become base 2.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >$10M is certainly not ten megadollars. Money is not covered by S.I./metric units anyway, so not sure what's the point of this argument. And even at that, while M here is the "mega" unit, the value 10M is still 10 million (1010^6) dollars (not 102^20 dollars).
- turbopony 6y ago
  That's a good point. We might have to start saying megadollars. M$10 looks kind of clumsy, though.
- rualca 6y ago
  > Except when it, of course, isn't. $10M is certainly not ten megadollars. The unit of currency is the dollar. There is no units of currency that corresponds to 1M dollars. The SI system of units devised a systematic way to define derived units that reflect a certain amount expressed in the base unit. Currency don't have the benefit.
- soneil 6y ago
  > The SI base unit for mass is the kilogram. This reminds me of something I was unaware of until very recently; the decibel (dB), is one tenth of a Bel. The discussion was that you'll never confuse a B(byte) with a B(bel) because we never specify 10dB as 1B, and we almost never need to specify a 10th of a byte. But back to your point - we use base10 for everything but RAM. So if we'd stuck to one system to avoid confusion, RAM probably wouldn't have won.
argvargc 6y ago
The "highest selling single computer model" of all time was not called the Commodore 65.536, it was called the Commodore 64. As was the common convention, all advertising materials, all reviews, all documentation and all common understanding was that the 64 in its title represented 64KB as in Kilobytes. This same convention, for MB = Megabytes, and GB = Gigabytes and all of these representing powers of 2 (no matter how "incorrect" that may be), was proliferated through the overwhelming majority of advertising, commentary and documentation both previously through the 70's, and through the 80's, 90's and 2000's. This was the convention commonly understood for the many-decades-long duration of the birth of modern computing. To attempt to change it after decades of intrenchment for the "technically correct" version and gain loads of confusion, and almost nothing in return, is a bad value proposition.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >This was the convention commonly understood for the many-decades-long duration of the birth of modern computing. As countless others already wrote here, that (and all your examples) where the case (and remain the case) for memory. Disks, network, etc, have used the powers of ten since forever...
  - argvargc 6y ago
    Disks are memory, and many floppy disk manufacturers for example seemed perfectly capable of following the long-established convention for memory without (much) issue.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Which is neither here, nor there. Hard disks are not floppy disks or memory, they always used base10 since half a millenium, and Apple just continues the same, like everybody else. End of non story.
- soneil 6y ago
  I've never disputed that this was the convention for RAM. But it never has been for harddrives. To borrow your C64 example, the most popular harddrives to add to a C64 were Lt.Kernal(Fiscal) drives. The first model, sold as 10MB, was 256 bytes per sector, 32 sectors per track, for 1224 tracks. Giving us a raw capacity of 10,027,008 bytes - 10MB or 9.5MiB. You're talking about it being a convention in home computers when the vast, vast majority of them simply didn't have harddrives - While the machines that did have harddrives were already using base10 (an RK05 was 1.2Mwords - 1,200,000 words. Twice the RK04's 600kwords). The convention has always been base2 for RAM and base10 for storage. And yes, it's always caused confusion. Just as the convention has always been bits/sec instead of bytes/sec for linespeed, even though this also causes confusion to this day. The awkward truth is that none of this was ever intended to be consistent. From the day we started selling computers to people who weren't 100% sure what these numbers meant, it's always been "close enough".