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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
by 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 agoDisks 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 agoWhich 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 agoI'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".
- argvargc 6y agoExactly. If we may now agree that the original, widespread understanding of a KB was of 1024 bytes, and a MB of 1024 KB, and that only later did a widespread impression start to be spread that actually a KB|MB could be 1000 instead, we strike at the very heart of this issue: Adopting an alternative "standard" spearheaded by particular (and not all) storage manufacturers incentivised in the first instance to use the previously well-established terms KB and MB duplicitously in their favour, strikes me as the worst way to resolve any consumer confusion surrounding it.