5 ms·
The 1.44 MB diskette is my canonical "dear God what happened"-named thing. The traditional diskette is 1440 KiB. I.e., base-2, today named "kibibyte" though in
by deathanatos 1y ago
The 1.44 MB diskette is my canonical "dear God what happened"-named thing.
The traditional diskette is 1440 KiB. I.e., base-2, today named "kibibyte" though in that day that word didn't exist yet & it was just a kilobyte and the base 2 inferred from context. Clearly, someone didn't infer, and moved the decimal, so that 1.44 "MB" is 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. The actual capacity is thus either 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB.
- hinkley 1y agoHard drives continued to make that mistake, and once you got to GB size they were overselling the disk space by an appreciable amount.
- alanfranz 1y agohard drives intentionally use giga and tera rather than gibi and tebi. They're right; it's the memory sticks that are usually wrong :-)
- chuckadams 1y agoNobody says "gibibyte" out loud without giggling or getting giggled at. I think we should start saying "gigglebyte".
- hinkley 1y agoKnow that several of your coworkers are laughing at you in their minds every time you utter such foolishness.
- bombela 1y agoI have had to debug enough fires because of stupid unit confusion that I now make the point of being extremely pedantic with the use of the right unit.
- genewitch 1y agojigglybits works too in the correct company also cal state irvine had a compsci prof who said "jigga-byte"
- hinkley 1y agoOne point twenty one jiggabytes??? Great Scott!
- edoceo 1y agoI've been calling them Kibbles, Marbles, Gerbils and Tribbles
- hinkley 1y agoPebble scale computing is all the rage right now.
- jimmaswell 1y agoIMO it's the ISP's who are intentionally misleading people. Average Joe might have some inkling of how big a gigabyte is these days, but nobody except a network engineer cares what a gigabit is. I can't imagine how many people buy gigabit fiber expecting a gigabyte. It would sound much less impressive if it were marketed as 125MB/s like it should be. They should at least be required to show both, not make people convert units if they want to find out how fast their advertised internet is supposed to download their 50GB game.
- hnuser123456 1y agoYou could also blame Windows. Linux counts storage bytes in base 10. But still counts RAM in base 2.
- spauldo 1y agoI don't think that counts as intentionally misleading since bits/second is the correct measurement for any serial connection and has been since the days of Baudot. Joe Blow might misunderstand it but that's on Joe. It's not like the situation with hard drives where they're going against industry convention for marketing purposes.
- grishka 1y agoMacOS uses decimal units to display file sizes and it kinda drives me nuts.
- bigbuppo 1y agoI thought they tossed the fool that tried to make mebibyte a thing off a bridge and we tried to forget about that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoPerhaps the formatted capacity, or the safe capacity, but I can specifically recall being able to format those same floppies up to... I forget, maybe ~2MB? Something like that.
- krs_ 1y agoSame with older floppy disk formats. Using FAT16 (or FAT12 on some systems) you can often format DD 3.5" disks to 830K instead of the usual 720K. On the Amiga the same disks are usually 880K.
- deathanatos 1y agoYes, the typical formatted capacity. The word "traditional" was the brevity which was attempting to sum that up. There were also other, weirder setups where you could get various other capacities. It was a wild time.
- stoobs 1y agoYeah, the unformatted capacities of 3.5” floppy disks were: SS-DD - 512KB DS-DD - 1MB HD - 2MB ED - 4MB LS (floptical) - 21MB Technically you could format some of the lower density media in the high density drives and get the expanded capacity (although you may have needed to modify the media a little - holepunch to make an HD drive see a DS-DD disc as “HD”), although it wasn’t always very reliable and depended on the physical media and the capabilities of the individual drives. Different file systems used the 2*80 tracks differently, hence the different formatted capacity, DOS usually had the lowest, Macintosh in the middle, Amiga had the most (although the Amiga HD floppies were a bit of a cludge - the drive spun at half speed due to a limitation of the Amiga floppy controller, which was also the reason you couldn’t just use a “PC” HD floppy in an Amiga without modification).
- bigstrat2003 1y ago> today named "kibibyte" though in that day that word didn't exist yet & it was just a kilobyte and the base 2 inferred from context That is still what most people do. Only very pendantic individuals insist on using KiB, etc. Normal people are just fine inferring from context whether base-2 or base-10 is meant.
- Arrowmaster 1y agoMy opinion is use KiB as the abbreviation but pronounce it as kilobyte. It pisses off both sides but makes the most sense to me for both being technically and historically accurate at the same time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fghorow 1y agoBack in the day -- when used for a disk drive -- we used to call 1000 * 1024 bytes a "marketing megabyte" and 1024*1024 bytes a "megabyte". YMMV.