this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
146 points (69.5% liked)

Technology

62073 readers
4809 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
146
Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (zeta.one)
submitted 1 year ago by wischi@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
214 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I often find myself explaining the same things in real life and online, so I recently started writing technical blog posts.

This one is about why it was a mistake to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte. It's about a 20min read so thank you very much in advance if you find the time to read it.

Feedback is very much welcome. Thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mb_@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Weird numbering system? Things are still stored in blocks of 8 bits at the end, it doesn't matter.

When it gets down to what matter on hard drives, every byte still uses 8 bits, and all other numbers for people actually working with computer science that matter are multiples of 8, not 10.

And because all internal systems use base 8, base 10 is "slower" (not that it matters any longer.