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When did the redefining of a KB from 1024 bytes to 1000 bytes happen? And has it truly happened? If you get 2GB RAM don't you get 2048 MB, not 2000 MB? I've alw
by curiousdannii 14y ago
When did the redefining of a KB from 1024 bytes to 1000 bytes happen? And has it truly happened? If you get 2GB RAM don't you get 2048 MB, not 2000 MB? I've always thought it was just the harddrive manufacturers being stingy, claiming their drives had more than they actually did.
- Uchikoma 14y agoThe switch - although not in my head - came when more people got computers, cameras and iPods, being exposed to storage compared to computers, where they didn't care or know. People care about storage since the store large amounts of mp3 and images. 1000KB = 1GB, 1000GB = 1TB is easier for most people than 1024KiB = 1GiB, 1024Gib = 1TiB.
- scholia 14y agoManufactures do it because bigger numbers sell better than smaller ones. Which works fine until people create or download a few files and find they have been conned: they don't have as much usable space as they thought they'd paid for.
- snowwrestler 14y agoThe redefining went the other way. Under the conventions of metric prefixes, k has always meant 1000, not 1024. It was only in the computer industry that k was bastardized to mean 1024, and once enough people realized it was wrong, they created the ki prefix to indicate the 10th power of 2.