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I wonder why RAM manufacturers are so generous that they don't engage in deceptive marketing, while everyone else does.
by taffer 4y ago
I wonder why RAM manufacturers are so generous that they don't engage in deceptive marketing, while everyone else does.
- babypuncher 4y agoIt goes back to the '60s and '70s. Back then, a "byte" was not necessarily "8 bits", but whatever the smallest unit of addressable memory was. This was the same as or an even fraction of the word length of the computer. Common word lengths back then included 12, 18, 24, and even 30 bits. 8-bit bytes would only fit evenly into one of those. Storage devices like hard drives are not addressed like memory, and the logical segmentation of bits into bytes/words/clusters was a function of the software, not the hardware. One storage device could be built for use in an 8-bit or 12-bit computer, resulting in very different numbers if you tried counting its size in bytes on these different machines.