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This is a myth. The very first harddrive was 5,000,000 characters - in the 1950s. The first PC harddrives came in 10 & 20MB. Harddrives have always been base1
by soneil 3y ago
This is a myth. The very first harddrive was 5,000,000 characters - in the 1950s. The first PC harddrives came in 10 & 20MB. Harddrives have always been base10. Linespeed has always been base10. Clock speed has always been base10. It's RAM that's the odd one out.
I believe that where the disconnect has occurred, is that when home computing started - RAM is pretty much all you had. We didn't have megabit networking, we didn't have harddrives, if we were lucky we had cassettes. So the binary prefixes were absorbed in isolation.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoNo, 10MB or 100MB, etc. was measured using powers of 2. It's not true that it was always based 10. It made a big stir when they reached GB range and changed to powers of 10. I remember it.
- soneil 2y agoTo quote Jerry, show me the money? For example, https://www.ebay.com/itm/225315397038 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225315397038 The label of this drive gives us CHS figures for three different models: cyl * h * s * B 127MB = 919 * 16 * 17 * 512 = 127,983,616B (124MiB) 170MB = 1011 * 15 * 22 * 512 = 170,818,560B (162MiB) 340MB = 1011 * 15 * 44 * 512 = 341,637,120B (325MiB) So we're at 127MB and they're already base10. For some reason everyone remembers it, but no-one's been able to show me.